Day 11 – A Song From Your Favorite Band
“Universal Trendsetter” – Young Fresh Fellows
My first favorite band was The Beatles. This was a discovery of my early teenage years. A few years later I discovered The Ramones and the entire genre of music that band inspired. For many years I couldn’t decide which band was my favorite, being an ardent fan of both. This continued for a while, and to this day both bands take equal standing as my number 2 band.
In 1989, over Labor Day weekend however, my world view shifted. It was a Bumbershoot, the annual music and arts festival in Seattle, and I was going around the various stages just checking stuff out. At one venue I didn’t know what band was going to play next, but they were about to start, so I hung around. Turns out it would be the local group The Young Fresh Fellows. Their fifth album was just released, and first with new lead guitar player Kurt Bloch (splitting time with his other band The Fastbacks as well as producing more records than humanly possible).
The set the band played was equal parts Beatles and Ramones. The band managed to capture the essence of everything I loved about the various forms of rock and roll in their purest forms and distill them into one single type of delivery. I was instantly hooked.
Over the years I would continue to see the band at any opportunity. I’ve lost count of how many times I have seen The Young Fresh Fellows. The band has remained my favorite to this day, through there are periods of time when I go through a phase of having a temporary favorite for a couple of months, and that’s usually a band that’s already one of my top 10, such as Cheap Trick, The Replacements, Devo, etc. I always wind up returning to The Young Fresh Fellows.
So why did I pick this song? No reason.