Regular readers of the blog may be wondering, "Did the big Ape go off the deep end after their birthday?" Naw, although I did give myself a little break to think about what I wanted to write about next. After all, you come here for high-quality insights, honesty, and the reasonably obscure. I don't want to dash missives off just to make a deadline.
So I thought, "What about shitty comps and samplers?"
See, I have always loved a well-curated compilation, as well as an inexpensive sampler. Both have died off a bit, replaced by Bandcamp benefits or limited edition RSD vinyl. CDs weren't perfect, but they were so cheap you could give them away; if you scored a single sale on 100 samplers given away, you paid for your investment. So I have a ton of these damn things in boxes in my apartment, knowing they're the reason I got into Assholeparade or Albert Ayler or Antischism, just to name a few "A" bands.
The flip side are the really cruddy samplers that I held onto because they had one song worth owning. It's why I have a bunch of Victory Records giveaways and Warped Tour double CDs taking up space. That
Geffen comp has a bunch of mid-90s garbage on it, but it also has great songs from Nirvana and that dog. on it. I still have CMJ CDs from the late 80s because they had a Sun Ra song on them, or a Fudge Tunnel track that I was really stoked on in 1993.
"You'll Never Eat Fast Food Again" is the perfect illustration of my point. There's a ton of mall punk dross here, from the major-label-masquerading-as-an-indie Drive-Thru Records. Allister, Cousin Oliver, Midtown, Fenix*Tx, RX Bandits: all the (s)hits are here. It's all perfectly inoffensive, unremarkable music that was targeted to kids who'd never held a zine. Cool, cool, cool cool. Cool. But...
I held onto this for the Wrens and New Found Glory tracks. I had no clue who the Wrens were in 1999; only that they sounded like the only adults on this entire record. As the story goes, the Wrens were dropped by Wind-Up, and had a handshake deal to put out their third record with Drive-Thru. However, the only work they released together were the two songs here: an early version of "This Boy Is Exhausted", and "Miss Me", which wouldn't make it onto "The Meadowlands" four years later.
New Found Glory was the only band here I was familiar with before getting a promo of this around its release date. This was Chad from Shai Hulud's pop punk band. Shai Hulud had released a trio of brutal records in the two years before this came out, and Chad had been passing around copies of the NFG EP on Fiddler as Shai Hulud toured behind them. There was no denying that this was some catchy, high-quality pop punk; the songs were tight and super well-written, the recording was raw and honest, and the first full-length on Eulogy flowed perfectly with its added movie samples. No wonder that Drive-Thru paid $5,000 to license that LP and reissue it. Their two songs here, "Hit and Miss" and "3rd and Long", are perfect examples of how good that era of pop punk could be.
The first version of this release, produced before Drive-Thru began distribution through MCA, has a total of 25 songs on it. It also has the NFG songs with samples in them. The version you'll encounter the most in the wild (posted here) drops songs from Mothermania, Face First, and Cousin Oliver. There's a cover variant that's missing the Parental Warning hype. There's also a giveaway that, for some reason, only has 16 songs on it, dropping the last six that are found on the common version. That's a lot of variation for a $2.99 CD.
