The Salad Diaries I: after the boys of summer have gone
"Out on the town today,
I saw an autographed Angry Salad CD in the bargain rack.
A little voice inside my head said
'Don't look back. You can never look back.'"
- With apologies to Don Henley
Some of the most prized posessions in my CD collection are my signed copies of all three Angry Salad CDs. Now, you can pick up their major label debut at Amazon for a penny plus shipping.
Every few years you hear about a band who embodies the spirit of community, with tremendous grassroots followings, and an unbelievable commitment to their fans. Hippies had the Grateful Dead, then Phish, Widespread Panic or any number of other former HORDE festival mainstays. Christian music has groups like Caedmon’s Call and Waterdeep.
We had Angry Salad.
This band, while it didn’t change the world, served as the soundtrack of my buddy John and I and our wives’ (then girlfriends’) lives for a few years in the mid-to-late 90’s. Precious and few bands could inspire the four of us to see them live back to back multiple nights in a row. Precious and few bands would allow the likes of us to help them break down their equipment and give us a ride to our car in their tour van. Precious and few bands claimed to have been named by an inebriated Freddie Mercury.
They weren’t an innovative, Earth-shakingly creative band. They played simple, nice-guy pop-rock in the vein of other late-90’s “where are they now” bands like the Gin Blossoms, Hootie and the Blowfish, and Toad the Wet Sprocket. For a bunch of kids in their early-to-mid 20’s who were inundated with this stuff, though, it was manna, and it wasn’t being fed to us from MTV or top 40 radio.
Looking through their tour history, I realized that I’ve seen this band live more times than any other. From 1996 to 2000 I saw them on average 3 times a year. No, it’s not much compared to some Deadheads or Phish fans who followed their respective obsessions around the country, but it’s enough for a sheltered suburban New England boy and his friends.
I hope you’ll indulge me over the next few days, as I’ll be wallowing in shameless nostalgia (”You can never look back,” huh? Take that, Henley!). Hope it doesn’t bore the rest of you…
Popularity: 10% [?]
February 21st, 2006 at 9:54 am
[...] 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… [...]