Michael Fremer

At a party the other day, I heard a guy complaining about the sad state of rock’n’roll, pop, or whatever you want to call it. “Where are today’s Beatles,” he demanded to know. “Listen to the crap on the radio,” he went on. I tried to remind him that aside from the odd ‘60’s cultural inversion that made what was good, popular, (Beatles, Stones, Byrds, Motown, etc.), much of what was good was not popular (Dylan for instance), and that by the end of the decade what we consider “popular,” (Hendrix, Clapton, Cream, Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, etc.) were essentially “underground” acts, way outside of the mainstream “Top 40.”

Why this elegant-sounding Chicago based band steeped in the best of 1970s folk/rock chose to name itself after an obscure, and pretty much ignored fish--a trout relative (Salvelinus malma) that is not pursued either commercially or as a sport fish--is a question I can't answer. Naming your band after a fish is odd--doubly so when it's one that makes it sound as if you're talking about a person instead of a group, as in "Have you heard Dolly Varden?" "No. Who is she?" Or another response: "Dolly Parton? No, but I heard she did a version of 'Stairway to Heaven'! What was she thinking?"

By the end of the '70s, rock was dead, prog-rock had grown grotesquely self-indulgent, and the angry punk/new wave deconstruction had begun. It was a long-overdue musical cleansing. The Sex Pistols and The Clash were at opposite ends of the dividing line: one unabashedly stupid, the other worldly and literate. The late Joe Strummer was anything but working class, but he kept his upper-class roots tightly wrapped beneath a veneer of growling anger and disgust. He was hardly alone in towing the image line.

LPs are back, but they can be expensive--I don't have to tell you that. One of the great frustrations of their return is finding a bin full of unknowns and not knowing which might be worthwhile. That's why you come to this site. But where do I turn? To find this moody, evocative album I turned to a guy working the crowded floor at Rocks In Your Head, a densely packed Prince Street LP emporium in NYC's Tribeca area.