Keith Pille's Weekly Shuffle

Every week, I will fire up the Shuffle Songs option on my iPod; the first song to come up, no matter what it is, will get an instant, unvarnished review. We're at the mercy of random chance and the limits of my digital music collection. Let's see where this takes us.

P'twgs
The Honeydogs, Everything, I Bet You

Wow. There's an obscure one.

The Honeydogs are a Minneapolis band who've faded in and out of existence a couple of times during the past decade (maybe not officially, but I know there was at least one extended stretch where you never heard a damned thing about them). They're a pretty good, almost great, local band--there was a point around 1997-8 when I was convinced that they were going to be the band that brought Minneapolis back to the national spotlight. This was back when the alt-country wave was cresting; the Honeydogs, at least back in those days, were almost the epitome of the loose, country-inflected rock band that could switch easily from laid-back reflection to rocking your doors off. Everything, I Bet You was their high-water-mark album, at least in terms of apparent potential; it was the one that made it look like the 'Dogs were going places.

There's a lot of good stuff on Everything, but "P'twgs" isn't too special. An easy, lilting 2-minute instrumental, it works just fine in the album context as a break before a big Gram Parsons-style rave-up. On its own, it just sounds empty and masturbatory; it bubbles up and makes you ask, "who the hell is this, again?" I can't imagine that this is the effect the Honeydogs were shooting for.

So what happened to the Honeydogs? They signed to a major after Everything, and released a fairly rotten album called Seen a Ghost- most of the songs on Ghost sucked, and the ones that didn't were generally overproduced remakes of songs off of the Honeydogs' back catalog. Compounding their troubles, they cut short their Ghost-support tour to serve as the opening act on INXS's final (well, final for a while, I guess) tour, which let them showcase their act for large crowds who didn't give a damn.

They returned to Minneapolis and semi-obscurity. I guess their most recent album's ok, but I felt so burned by Seen a Ghost that I've been avoiding it for years. I still like Everything, though, and some of its highlights pop up on my mix CDs pretty often.

"Pt'wgs" isn't one of those highlights, though.

Weekly Shuffle Scoreboard (Best to Worst):
1. "Rock N Roll Radio V2," Derailleur
2. "Back from Somewhere (live)," Husker Du
3. "The Ride of the Valkyries," Richard Wagner
4. "Powderfinger," Neil Young
5. "Sliver (live)," Nirvana
6. "Whiskey Bottle," Uncle Tupelo
7. "Don't Be Afraid of the Robot," Electric Six
8. "Gassed & Stoked," Lou Reed
9. "Shooting Star," Golden Smog
10. "You Are the Everything," R.E.M.
11. "Nicotine & Gravy," Beck
12. "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (live)," Wilco
13. "The Calming Sea," Beachwood Sparks
14. "John, I'm Only Dancing," David Bowie
15. "Take It or Leave it," The Strokes
16. "Is It Too Late?", World Party
17. "P'twgs," The Honeydogs
18. "Monkey Dot," Money Mark
19. "I Wanted to Tell You," Matthew Sweet
20. "Soldier's Joy," Mark O'Connor
21. "Masoko Tanga," The Police
22. "Scenery," Neil Young and Pearl Jam
23. "We Got The," The Beastie Boys
24. "The Big Foist," The Minutemen
25. "Climbing up the Walls," Radiohead
26. "That's When I Reach for My Revolver," Mission of Burma