Meet the Deedles (1998)

This is the film that begs the existential question "Why?" on so many levels it could drive the most sublime Buddhist nuts. How bad is this nit-wit teen surf romp? Jazz singer Diane Shuur, whose unfortunate nickname happens to be "Deedles," sued the film's distributor, claiming it made her look bad! The soundtrack is indeed better than the film, leaning on heavy doses of late '90s ska revivalism for its charms. "Hawaii Five-O" with a blue beat? You betcha! And one more question, Grasshopper: Is the tail (the soundtrack) now wagging the dog (this big, bad bow-wow of a movie)? --Jerry McCulley

Jerry McCulley wrote (still writes?) for Rolling Stone and this is what he had to say about Meet the Deedles, both the movie and the soundtrack.  I have no idea if this was written for said national publication.  This blurb is the featured review for the soundtrack on Amazon, this is not a user review.  Apparently, this is the best review they could find about Meet the Deedles, "it's better than the movie."  

This movie came out in 1998 and even though I was a teenager, I had good enough judgement to know this movie was going to be awful.  This movie came out a few months before the Rotten Tomatoes came online, but it's pretty clear this movie would've been rated in the single digits if not a flat out 0 if we were to take an aggregate of critics' reviews.  So why do I know anything about this movie or it's soundtrack?  One reason: I loved Weezer.

Now if you take a look at this track listing, there's no mention of Weezer.  There are definitely lots of ska bands, some swing, and surf rock legend Gary Hoey.   Homie was a Rivers Cuomo sort of one off project featuring Matt Sharp (Weezer, The Rentals), Yuval Gabay (Soul Coughing), Greg Brown (Cake) and Adam Orth (Shufflepuck).  It's a collection of musicians that seems both random and totally logical at the same time.  Cake, Soul Coughing and Weezer were all getting radio play in the mid 90s so it would make sense they would've crossed paths during a tour or at a Weenie Roast.  I'll be honest, I had never heard of Shufflepuck until I decided to confirm who was in the band.  I'm not sure if this qualifies as a super group. 

Homie's contribution to Meet the Deedles is an original song called "American Girls".  It definitely does not sound like a Weezer song, but it is definitely Rivers Cuomo singing, and it's definitely clear that he wrote the lyrics for the song.  For example:


"Lady, you knock me on my knees and I can't stand up
You got the look in your eye and you smack my butt
Why are all American girls so rough?
Why do all American girls act so tough?
Why are all American girls so rough?"

There are pianos, acoustic guitars, and some very Cake-esque guitar riffs throughout the song but none of that signature Weezer distortion.  It's kind of an important song in Weezer-lore since I believe this is the last Rivers/Matt Sharp recorded collaboration.  I'm not interested in re-igniting the Weezer Matt Sharp debate that SNL perfectly parodied but I do think that Weezer's collaborative spirit, or ability to discern good collaboration opportunities left when Matt left the band and it didn't really return unless you count the time that Lil Wayne showed up.  For perspective, the following year on The Rentals' album, Seven More Minutes, Sharp would go on to recruit Maya Rudolph, Ash's Tim Wheeler, and Blur frontrman / pre-Gorillaz  Damon Albarn.

Now 1998 was during the Harvard era of Weezer where they were technically on hiatus and Matt Sharp was technically still considered a band member.  Weezerpedia's entry on Homie is convoluted at best.  There are live bootlegs of a "harder rock" version of the song but it's still not really a Weezer song.  It's odd to me that the one officially finished Homie song would get buried on a soundtrack, but perhaps that's how they wanted it to be.  It's a good song, but not one that would justify me coughing up $16.99 at a Sam Goody.  There's definitely enough in this song that made me want to hear more from Homie, but maybe this is the best that came out of their sessions.  Their hopes and dreams of becoming the new Traveling Wilburys were immediately dashed.  Clearly, Rivers is doing fine these days without Homie.

If you don't know who Soul Coughing is, they had a song called "Super Bon Bon" that got some radio play.  I liked them quite a bit even though they clearly don't like each other.  If you're still not sure who Soul Coughing is, then you definitely don't know who Geggy Tah is, another one of the few non-ska/swing/surf bands on this soundtrack.  Geggy Tah had a single "Whoever You Are" that is pretty catchy.  It got some radio play but it didn't necessarily propel them to super stardom, though it ended up getting licensed in a Mercedes Benz commercial years after the song was released.  Geggy Tah co-founder Greg Kurstin would eventually become a world conquering pop producer.  Also featured on the soundtrack is ska/punk band Goldfinger, whose lead singer John Feldman would take a similar path but his path would be slightly more rock oriented.  


I'm not trying to build a narrative that that these super producers wouldn't of become who they are today because of Meet the Deedles, but it's a reminder of how many careers in the music business aren't linear progressions. Obviously, there were a lot of stops between point A and B.  It's not like Greg Kurstin quit the music industry and 20 years later he randomly received a call from Adele's manager asking if he's the guy from Geggy Tah.  5 Seconds to Summer wasn't the first act that John Feldman was able to work with.  His rise to producer fame is a little less jarring than Kurstin's since he worked and still works with a lot of 90s bands that would be considered peers of his old band like blink 182, Good Charlotte, and 311.  Also, he hasn't been on stage accepting the Album of the Year Grammy with Adele.


These sorts of pivots will be highlighted throughout this series.  Being a decent musician is tough, making a living off of being a musician is damn near impossible.  It would be a disservice to call Kurstin and Feldman "lucky" to be where they are since they had to grind their way to where they are through session work and writing for other artists before becoming industry giants, but they are definitely fortunate to be the exception to the rule.  While some of the bands on the soundtrack are still functioning entities, Rivers Cuomo and Greg Brown are probably the only ones enjoying the same sort of success that they had in the 90's, though it seems that nostalgia is starting to smile more fondly on ska, but I may only think that because I live in Southern California and have friends that were part of the scene in ska's heyday.  

With Meet the Deedles arriving on a streaming service for the 1st time, I'd be lying if I expected anyone to revisit the soundtrack because of that.  Perhaps, the movie can find a cult following as a "so bad it's good" entry but I don't expect the soundtrack to take off with it.  It'll be there to remind me of high school, where swing and ska found 15 minutes in the mainstream, and the time where we were uncertain of the future of Weezer.  Rest in peace Homie.  May you continue to delight and confuse Weezer fans with your existence.    

Introduction

I started my deep dive into music fandom in the mid-90s.  Because I was still young and without steady employment, I had to be very judicious how I spent those precious few dollars.  I needed musical bang for my buck so I would usually skip buying soundtracks since it seemed like a lot of soundtracks only had a track or two worth listening to.  While this isn't the best example, I asked a friend in middle school to dub a copy of the Batman Forever Soundtrack onto a blank cassette for me so I could hear the, at the time unreleased, Sunny Day Real Estate song.  No, I didn't care that U2 had a brand new song on there, I wanted the Sunny Day Real Estate song.  Obviously, we can all agree that "Kiss from a Rose" is the real winner but that's how my brain worked in 1995.

Back then, the notation "previously unreleased" was like a drug to me and I was definitely addicted.  I wanted to hear every song that all my favorite bands recorded.  Sure Rushmore had a great soundtrack and score, but did it have any unreleased Pavement?  I was much more interested in hunting down new songs which is probably why I feel like the best rock soundtrack of the last 25 or so years (non-Hedwig and the Angry Inch division) is Romeo and Juliet and not Guardians of the Galaxy.

When Napster arrived, I was able to dive into any soundtrack that I'd ever been interested in without any repercussions.  I could listen to that one song from that one soundtrack from that one movie that I never bothered to see.  I could now hear every throwaway or hidden treasure that my favorite bands released.  I even learned of some new bands on the way.  Combined with having high speed internet, it was the greatest year to be a freshman in college.

Recently, someone mentioned some facts about Meet the Deedles and how it's accompanying  soundtrack is all ska. I corrected them that the soundtrack was not in fact all ska, not because it was important to me, but because I was excited to present the only fact that I knew about this movie.  There weren't a flood of memories coming back to me, but just a single memory about one song.  In fact, I didn't even check if this was the only non-ska song, it didn't matter.

It did make me think about all the other soundtracks that I listened to during my high school and college years and how cobbled together a lot of them seemed. Obviously, this doesn't apply to the standard soundtrack: the film score with the occasional pop song to play over the credits.  I'm talking about the soundtrack with a bunch of artists who contribute songs, some unreleased and some not, some written for the movie and others taken from the b-sides vault. They're a weird marriage of the film and music industry that's supposed to be mutually beneficial.   Sometimes, you get Romeo and Juliet where it even works as a great standalone album and sometimes you get the Empire Records Soundtrack that had that really good Gin Blossoms song and briefly relaunched Edwyn Collins' career while briefly doing nothing for Liv Tyler's.

Sometimes songs can even transcend the movie.  I don't know a lot of people that re-watch The Bodyguard or Titanic on a regular basis, but when those big ballads from Whitney (courtesy of Dolly) or Celine play at a department store, everyone knows what movie those songs came from.  That god damn Simple Minds song from The Breakfast Club not only bookends one of my favorite Futurama episodes but it also resolves both the A and B plots of Pitch Perfect, which now that I write this out, sounds like a result of lazy screenwriting.

It would be a dream of mine to be a soundtrack coordinator for a film since that would be the perfect intersection of my 2 passions.  Clearly, there's more nuance to the job than picking the best song for a scene and I'm sure the process is both fascinating and frustrating. Who decides whether they should get an artist to record original songs for the soundtrack?  Who decided that rap artists and rock artists should collaborate for the entire Judgement Night Soundtrack?

I'll be exploring some lesser known soundtracks, lesser known than Judgement Night even, not to re-evaluate them as some sort of hidden masterpiece, but because they all have left some sort on indelible impression on me over the years.  The world doesn't need another think piece on the brilliance of Purple Rain, but it might need a think piece on how out of place it would be for a hypothetical Prince (RIP) to score and soundtrack a whole Batman movie or any superhero movie in the present day.

Like I've mentioned, these soundtracks can be strange beasts. This doesn't even take into account soundtracks that have songs from the movie and songs "influenced by the movie".  I'll try to keep from diving too deep into the business side of things unless it actually adds to the mystique of these albums.  Perhaps, it'll explain some of these one-off collaborations like Kendrick Lamar, Alicia Keys, the lead guitarist from Incubus, Pharrell and Hans Zimmer making a song for The Amazing Spiderman 2 (Andrew Garfield edition). It may or may not, but I'm excited to find out.

It only seems fitting that I start with the confusing album that sparked this project in the first place.  Chapter 1: Meet the Deedles.  Enjoy.

Table of Contents

1.  Introduction
2.  Meet the Deedles
3.  There's Something About Mary