Producer and A&R guru Rob Cavallo tried a similar thing with the ascendant pop-punk scene with 1995’s Angus, a beloved (if little-seen) teen drama. Despite never producing a movie before, Cavallo finagled an Executive Producer credit, and along with The Muffs & Green Day managers Elliot Cahn and Jeff Saltzman, proceeded to stuff the soundtrack with their own acts and other Reprise Records up-and-comers. The acts skew heavily towards Bay Area pop punk, with Dance Hall Crashers (discussed in a previous newsletter), Tilt, and of course, Green Day.
When Green Day’s Dookie hit in 1994, pop punk became huge: Their old label Lookout! suddenly found themselves with more money and attention that they ever had before, there was the concert film Jaded in Chicago, the SNL appearance, and the laundry list of pop punk bands all over the country finding themselves getting winded & dined by industry A&R.
1995 rolls around and the public is clamoring for more Green Day, and the stopgap before Insomniac came out turned out be one of their best songs ever: “J.A.R. (Jason Andrew Relva)”, written by bassist Mike Dirnt, about his childhood friend who died in a car accident. This was the lead single for the soundtrack album, and the only reason I even heard of the movie. It’s odd how siloed music & movies were at the time, where Empire Records could bomb at the box office yet have a big hit soundtrack. In any case, this is a great song about accepting death & moving on with your life, appropriate for a movie about dealing with the hand that life dealt you.
Angus is the type of movie that Hollywood used to come up with on a regular basis: a medium budget, down to Earth drama about normal people. Nowadays consolidation and massive franchises have all but decimated that segment of the industry. It also didn’t help that it opened when Braveheart and The Usual Suspects were still doing massive numbers.
For myself, the movie hits all the beats of my miserable school experience. I was fat, anxiety-ridden, and unable to relate to my peers, making me a prime target for bullying. We moved a lot because my Dad was in the Air Force, and for 8th grade we moved to a town in Ohio where seemingly everyone had lived there for generations, so my classmates were especially hostile to new kids. This was the type of town where the English teacher had taught 2 generations of the same shithead family and knew them all by name. Until I found my friends halfway through high school, with the help of our mutual love of pop punk, every torturous day seemed to stretch into infinity. Therefore I’ve only seen the movie once. Why do I need to rewatch something I lived through, minus the girl from Jurassic Park?
So the soundtrack album looms larger in my memory than the movie, and that success is due to most of the tracks following its emotional arc, despite almost none of them being written for it (more on that later). Young love, unrequited crushes, that bottomless despair specific to high school– all of these feelings show up across a relatively brief 12 tracks.
Ash stick out like a bit of a sore thumb, not just because they’re 1) Irish, or 2) way more of a bubblegum glam band, but because for some reason they get 2 songs on the album. “Jack Names the Planets” and “Kung Fu” are solid but unremarkable singles that managed to quickly get massive thanks to the UK music magazine machine. Ash weren’t (and aren’t) bad exactly, just a weird fit for this soundtrack, and in any case they have much better songs.
I don’t have much to say about “Enough” by Dance Hall Crashers except it’s what a lot of mainstream ska punk sounded like in the 90s: competent, but way closer to swing music than the marketing people would want you to believe. That’s not a knock on it: swing music is a lot more harmonically interesting than meat n potatoes pop punk, but like Phish and Dave Matthews Band, their fans made the scene more annoying than it could be.
The Riverdales and Smoking Popes (another band that appeared in a previous newsletter) are next representing the nascent Chicago punk scene. The Riverdales are essentially Screeching Weasel, a band massively indebted to Ramones, who broke up and immediately reformed to play, as they put it, more Ramones inspired music. I’ll admit that previous sentence is pretty odd, as it’s unclear just how Screeching Weasel could sound even more like The Ramones, but they did it! Their Green Day connection runs deep, as Billie Joe Armstrong mixed their first record (while pop punk mainstay Mass Giorgini produced) and the band opened for Green Day on the European leg of their 1995 tour.
Smoking Popes got another one of those sweet sweet 90s soundtrack placements with the midtempo “Mrs You and Me”, a perfectly sentimental ballad of unrequited love, reflecting the love story in Angus without rehashing the plot of the movie. That’s what Weezer did, submitting “Wanda (You’re My Only Love)”, a mellow acoustic song with lyrics that are just a description of the script. The song only exists as Rivers Cuomo’s acoustic demo, and by all accounts he was pretty torn up when the director rejected the song as too close to the movie. In the director’s defense, “Wanda” is not what Weezer sounded like in 1995, and the lyrics mention plot points (specifically Angus’ gay dad) that were cut from the film. “You Gave Your Love to Me Softly” was chosen instead, a b-side from a band that regularly left its best songs off albums, forcing fans to buy overpriced CD singles to complete their collection.
“Ain’t That Unusual” was an album track from Goo Goo Doll’s massive Boy Named Goo, and here it works perfect as another example of adolescent longing. I’m surprised this wasn’t a single from it’s original album, this is the kind of song music executives hear and immediately start calling radio stations. “Would you talk to me / honestly?” is such a great way to start a song, and it only gets better from there.
The Muffs contribute “Funny Face” from Blonder and Blonder and really what am I gonna say except listen to more of The Muffs (RIP). That said, it is surprising that a quarter of the songs on the soundtrack are by female-fronted bands, especially in the straight white male world of pop punk. I’m not sure how much of that was by design, since The Muff’s manager co-produced the soundtrack, and Rob Cavallo produced Dance Hall Crashers. Tilt’s “White Frame Homes” stands out not just as a great band, but tracing pop punk’s roots back to hardcore.
Within pop punk, there’s the smooth, melodic stuff (think NOFX or The Offspring) and the more rough n tumble type (more like The Descendants or The Ergs!). The former is what got huge in the mid 90s, but Tilt kept the flame alive for the noisier, out of tune pop punk for the hardcore fans not quite ready to give up their patch-covered vests. Naturally, a soundtrack about suburban angst also needed a song about how much the suburbs suck.
Queercore originators Pansy Division have a direct connection to Green Day; not only did they both play the Gilman Street scene, but Mike Dirnt wore their shirt (with a strategically placed patch covering up a picture of a penis) for Green Day’s SNL appearance. Pansy Division are unapologetically gay, a revolutionary stance in music at the time, in the midst of the AIDS epidemic and within the punk scene, which despite its claims of liberal ideas was very (and lets face it, still is) hostile to anyone not white, straight, and male.
“Deep Water” is just verse, chorus, verse, over and over, no bridge, nothing to distract you from the poetic yearning, from the horrible bottomless feeling that everyone has known. Desperate to escape their dead end town, unable to connect to anyone, counting the days til they escape: Pansy Division cuts right to the bone. The lyrics don’t attempt to make the theme applicable to everyone, this without a doubt a song about being lonely and queer, but that makes the song so good. We’re being led into the narrator’s hermetic world, with the anger and sadness particular to it, and the details from which the emotions are given a framework. We’re all the same in that we’re all different.
“Am I Wrong” is a perfect closing song. It’s emotional, a little schmaltzy, but by the end of an album of desire denied, you just need to let all those emotions explode. For Angus, it’s the first thing you hear when the movie opens. I can’t tell if that’s cruel to start the movie out with the most emotionally charged song, or if it’s smart to get you ready for a movie that pulls no punches about the emotional damage that bullying causes. It’s a great way to end the soundtrack though, threading the various themes of the previous songs into one soaring power ballad.
In the end, Angus doesn’t get the girl, but he does stand up for himself, and by refusing to back down to a bully learns a much more important lesson about himself and the world: you can’t run away from your problems.
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