Kuhbeere Kinepiffle: The Most Underrated Power Pop Band of the 1990s and My Favourite Calgary Rock Ensemble of All Time

Flop

Primrods

When I went gaga for punk music around the age of fourteen, it was the Ramones who got their hook in my gums and hoisted me out of the heavy metal doldrums. I converted with the kind of zeal only the pubescent possess. Every three months some book, movie, or album changes your life. I had a dope hand-me-down oldschool Marantz stereo my parents had bequeathed to me when they upgraded. I could play CDs, records, and tapes through high quality speakers and thus could not help but become an audiophile and a snob. I loved punk music wholeheartedly, but I owned nothing by the Sex Pistols or the Clash, much preferring Buzzcocks, and only a very small amount of hardcore. It was with street-fighting bubblegum pop that the Ramones had first hooked me, and the 1990s bands descending from the punk tradition that I fell most in love with around the age of fourteen were groups I now tend to categorize as power pop. Redd Kross, The Muffs, Fastbacks. As good as these bands or better, by my estimation, were Flop, who sang songs about stuff like Gregor Mendel's genetic experiments, Albert Einstein's Unified Field Theory, and Charles Laughton's gothic noir masterpiece The Night of the Hunter. I first encountered Flop when I saw the video for "The Great Valediction" on MuchMusic's vital underground music showcase City Limits. (MuchMusic was Canada's version of MTV and City Limits the rough equivalent of 120 Minutes.) That song came off Whenever You're Ready, the only album Flop would do with the participation of a major label, in this instance Epic Records subsidiary 550 Music. They did do one more album after that, but like so many bands that came before and after, the demoralizing major label experience helped accelerate their breakup. They were not around nearly long enough to my mind. (While you can stream the entirety of Whenever You're Ready as a single convenient file on YouTube, you cannot embed that file on Blogspot, so below you will find the two music videos that accompanied that album upon its release.)

The only thing that excited me as much as the Ramones when it came to discovering and exploring punk music was the revelation that my hometown of Calgary had a robust and highly idiosyncratic punk scene. Like Seattle, good bands seldom passed through Calgary so we had to do it ourselves. I had read about mysterious local music happenings and had become curious but it was only when I bought the legendary local underground/punk compilation Bloodbath at the Chinese Disco at Sam the Record Man that I figured I basically knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Capriciousness? Maybe a little. The most interesting and bizarre songs on the comp were the two by mysterious local outfit the Primrods, who I had the luxury of seeing perform many times before going away to university. They influenced my approach to the guitar and songcraft at least as much as John Fahey would subsequently do. Playful anarcho-syndicalism, with lyrics often referencing the mayhem of Western history—warfare, sabotage, spycraft—each member identified by the letter P followed by a number. When they released 1995's Kneecappin', their first proper non-cassette-only full-length, my friend Clifford and I were in total awe, quickly deciding that it was the greatest, most totally ingenius rock album ever. Amazingly enough, in a tale that would live in infamy, Chicago-based headbutting schizophrenic Wesley Willis was for a short, mercurial period a kind of über fan of our dissonant mystery men. Is that how the Primrods got signed to Geffen?! No other story is likely to make any more sense. If you had asked local scenesters in 1998 which hometown rockers would be least likely to get signed to a major, I suspect they'd all have identified the Primrods as suspect numero uno. Around the time they were recording the doomed Geffen album I asked P2 how they had managed to actually record an album for that outsized enterprise and he told me that they'd just taken their old approach and given it the "classic rock radio" treatment. Typically enough, the main reason the album never came out is because there was a sudden front office overhaul at Geffen and scorn was cast by the new executives upon most projects then in the works. And that was the unromantic end of the Primrods. Listen to the album—which I have been able to embed below—and I think you'll agree with me and P2 that it is brimful with remarkably palatable rock-and-roll music.