July 24, 2008

Remember The 77′s?

We asked Idolator’s Dan Gibson to contribute this week’s Remember… post, and he was kind enough to oblige. Not content on doing just the bare minimum, Dan also compiled a great Muxtape to help us remember the 77′s even better. So listen to it and read on…

As someone who spends vastly too much time reading music blogs of various levels of prestige and quality, I’m as tired as you probably are of reading impassioned posts associating a band or an album with emotional touchpoints in the author’s life. I enjoyed Siamese Dream as much as you did, pal, but is the world better off now that we know that Rocket totally helped you get through junior year? Probably not. The temptation for me in writing about the 77′s is to churn out 750 words of mixtape memories and tales of requited love soothed somehow by the Pray Naked album. You probably read High Fidelity, so I’ll spare you the Hornsbyesque pop music memoir… just replace the Velvet Underground songs with ones by Daniel Amos, and tone down the relationship drama.

Instead, let’s just spend a few minutes talking about the ten golden years of the 77′s catalog. Five albums, an OK live album and one weird collection of B-sides and ephemera released between 1984 and 1994. None of the albums are perfect, occasionally dipping into simulations of classic rock and/or AOR blues, and little that the band has done since approaches or accentuates what they released back then, but I’m here to contend that band during that decade produced some of the best music you’ve never heard.

77′s fans (a group that based on their internet presence nearly defy you to join their ranks) love to talk about the band’s hard luck story. Bourgeois Tagg, a band with a few very good songs, took off with a big secular hit from the same Sacramento scene that the 77′s were born in, but their residual fame didn’t rub off. The 77′s self titled album was released on Island Records the same day as U2‘s Joshua Tree, and despite receiving a positive review in Rolling Stone, Island ran with the Irish guys… and the rest you’ve probably already heard. It’s easy to mope on message boards about how your favorite band doesn’t receive the acclaim it deserves, we’ve all been there. A recent mention of a 77′s track on the New York Times website sparked a discussion on the official 77′s message board of how stupid the author was for calling the sound “Springsteen-esque”. Sure, it’s nearly impossible to obtain the band’s music, and their tour schedule consists of a small circuit of coffee shops and church basements, but hey, let’s get upset about a description used in a positive manner on one of the biggest websites in the world. Makes perfect sense. This is where the band lives now; occupying a level of fame that still makes life as a professional musician viable, but not famous enough that their comebacks are notable beyond a few hundred people.

Still, if the 77′s would have disbanded in 1994 following the release of the slightly disappointing Drowning With Land In Sight, when they were losing their deal with the label home of Amy Grant, Myrrh, maybe things might be different. Maybe if the Christian music industry cared about catalog or a sense of history, someone would dig through the wake of labels past and dead that the band recorded for, and put out a definitive best-of, well packaged and well promoted. To be certain, some of the All Fall Down tracks feature out of fashion synth work and bad studio ideas, and the thunderstorm sound affects from 1992′s The Rain Kept Falling In Love could stand to be edited out, but there’s a album of occasionally too-triumphant rock tracks and self-loathing pop songs full of enough misery to please an American Music Club fan lodged between a few overly indulgent eight-minute-plus blues raveups. For ten years, the 77′s mixed pop and new wave but picked the wrong venue to do so. No one in the Christian market wanted to hear something that recalled the Go Betweens, and the secular alternative market had moved on by the release of Pray Naked in 1992 to Rage Against the Machine and Pavement. Wrong place, wrong time, and probably the wrong style of music. The 77′s are unlikely to be redeemed by time, since the tastemakers who seem to determine what music rises from its out-of-print grave have little patience for the still quite uncool realms of Christian rock, no matter how deeply on the fringe of that term a band might be, and maybe that’s how many of the band’s fan might prefer things, having their precious band playing just for them at Cornerstone while being propped up by canes and walkers.

Still, every time I put on my personally selected collection of the band’s “hits,” I can’t help falling into the same trap, thinking of what might have been. Nearly 800 words later, I can hope maybe someone who stumbles upon this post tracks down Happy Roy or The Days to Come and finds a fraction of the enjoyment those songs and the others have brought me over the years. The 11-year-old Dan Gibson picking up the self-titled album at Gospel Supplies in 1987 thanks you, and the 32-year-old me occasionally trapped in the music of my youth thanks you for giving my favorite band of all time a chance.

8 Responses to “Remember The 77′s?”

  1. On 07/24/08 11:31 AM, Brian said:

    My high school youth pastor was all-about the 77s… he used to jam them when we’d drive around in his Jeep. I was glad he was into them instead of Michael W Smith or DC Talk, but I was into POD, Project 86, and Strongarm, so I never really had respect for the 77s.

    Listening to them now, I can appreciate their music more than I did then. They are not my favorite band, but I enjoy them and the good memories I associate with their music… plus I’m about as likely to listen to them today as I am to POD and Project 86!

  3. On 07/24/08 11:43 AM, rojas said:

    Great band. I got into them with their “Drowning With Land In Sight” release in 1994 and slowly worked my way backwards into their catalog.

    Great article good sir.

  5. On 07/24/08 12:37 PM, Rick. said:

    One of the best and most underrated bands of all time! Its rare we see a band of their talent in the pop music relm, and here is the real shocker…they know how to right really good songs…

    Listen and take notes kids!

  7. On 07/24/08 12:43 PM, Jay DiNitto said:

    I’m into some of their stuff.

  9. On 07/24/08 10:16 PM, orrin said:

    Yes they can right good songs but can they wrong bad ones?

  11. On 07/25/08 1:27 AM, thestormmaster said:

    My old copy of the 88 live album on tape is wore out. I would have liked to be at that show.

  13. On 07/25/08 12:32 PM, josh said:

    i have always loved the 77′s. “sticks and stones”, their b-sides record, was always my favorite…although “s/t” and “all fall down” have some great songs. i didn’t really enjoy their forays into blues rock but their straight pop songs have always been tops in my book.

  15. On 11/17/09 2:53 PM, The End of Idolator | Josh Mock said:

    [...] position that Gibson eventually took; he did much better at it than I would have. He has also contributed to Buzzgrinder a time or two, so that’s how you know he’s [...]

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