To celebrate 40 years of the Young Fresh Fellows, Split Tooth Media presents the origin story of one of Seattle’s finest rock bands and its debut record, The Fabulous Sounds of the Pacific Northwest (1984)

“WHO’S KILLING SEATTLE ROCK AND ROLL?” read a headline in the June 1984 issue of the Seattle music magazine The Rocket. In this “rant” by the publication’s senior editor, John Keister lays out an extensive list of factors behind the city’s inability to foster a thriving music scene: strict liquor laws, greedy promoters, low-paying gigs, a lack of all-ages shows. Keister asks if The Rocket itself and other local media outlets were also to blame for the sorry state of rock ’n’ roll in the area. But most of his frustration seems to come from the audiences and booking agents who preferred bar bands regurgitating radio rock onstage over up-and-comers playing original material. “The vast majority of live rock ’n’ roll on any given night in the area is, unfortunately, cover material played by bands who only provide momentary entertainment,” Keister writes. “They don’t create their own history, they don’t reflect local history, and when they die history instantly forgets them.” He concludes with what, at the time, must have read like fantasy: 

“But what this town really needs is one band to blow us all away. Just one band who can play some new music that captures the imagination of the town, that would turn everything around. It’s happened before, it can happen now. There’s somebody out there right now who can do it.”

We know that Seattle got that band and so much more. Keister’s desire for a renowned local music scene would be wildly overfulfilled. That “one band” would usher in the largest music-biz gold rush in American history and forever alter the universe’s perception of that dark corner of the world known as the Pacific Northwest. But all of that was still a ways away. For Rocket readers looking for something new in June 1984, all they had to do was scope the issue’s cover. On it they would find a very new band that was not only in the process of creating its own wild history but was also tapping into the Northwest’s rock ’n’ roll roots like few other acts at that time. 

To look at the Young Fresh Fellows on the cover of The Rocket, one could easily mistake them for an oddball Nuggets-era garage band. Lead guitarist/singer Chuck Carroll, bassist Jim Sangster, drummer Tad Hutchison, and singer/songwriter/guitarist Scott McCaughey look refreshingly out of time and out of fashion, especially among the New Wavers and metalheads who comprised a large chunk of Seattle’s music community. And once readers mosied over to a local record shop to pick up their debut album, The Fabulous Sounds of the Pacific Northwest, they would be hit by a similar sense of altered time — something that sounds both archaic and contemporary, wild and quaint, ambitious and joyfully spontaneous. 

From the beginning, the Fellows struck so many of the magic balances necessary to make great rock ’n’ roll. Produced by Conrad Uno at Egg Studios and released by his homegrown record label, PopLlama Products, The Fabulous Sounds of the Pacific Northwest had it all: garage rock gems like “Rock ’N’ Roll Pest Control” and “Teenage Dogs in Trouble,” should-be pop classics like “This Little Mystery” and “That Letter,” and three — count ’em — three different band themes. The album would lead them on a long, still-in-progress career filled with as many bizarre choices and ill-advised, often dangerous, antics as genuine milestones. To the band’s credit, the distinction between feat and folly often depends on who is telling the story. 

The Fabulous Sounds’ impact was not immediate. It instead had a trickling effect that helped open doors for the Fellows and their peers to regularly play original music in Seattle. With the album’s travelog-style introductions and between-song narration — stolen from a Bell Telephone recording to promote tourism in the Northwest — the band’s debut was destined to become a regional classic. But the album also helped put the Fellows on the national map. Aided by a network of college radio stations who gave them airplay, the Fellows became one of the first Seattle bands to embark on a DIY tour across the country in support of their 1985 follow-up album, Topsy Turvy. The years that followed would see the band release a treasure trove of official and unofficial albums, build a devoted international fanbase, carry on through lineup changes (Carroll left in 1988 and Kurt Bloch of The Fastbacks filled his place), and pick up right where they left off following McCaughey’s stroke in 2017. As McCaughey said in this summer’s tour announcement, “We never broke up and we probably never will.” 

Related: The Minus 5’s Stroke Manor according to Scott McCaughey by Craig Wright

The Fellows are certainly well-loved, but their legacy has often been defined as one of those “your favorite band’s favorite bands.” But, while connections with groups like The Replacements have led to their inclusion in some of the best rock myths of the 1980s, the Fellows have always deserved to be recognized as more than the band that played Paul Westerberg’s wedding, or as a footnote in the grunge history books, or for being name-checked by They Might Be Giants.

To celebrate four decades of the Fellows, McCaughey helmed “An Fortieth Anniversary Special Edition” of The Fabulous Sounds of the Pacific Northwest, due June 28 from Omnivore Recordings. Most notably, the remastered version locates McCaughey’s famously muffled bass playing, resequences the tracklist, and removes the original album’s narration between songs. These are major changes, but much like The Replacements’ essential 2023 reissue of Tim (1985), the remastered songs hit with more force and better capture the band’s ramshackle urgency. It’s the same classic record, but the new sequencing lets the songs blast through with a newfound energy and just the right amount of added clarity.

In this authorized oral history of The Fabulous Sounds of the Pacific Northwest, Split Tooth Media traces the Young Fresh Fellows’ formation, the tequila-fueled encounters that launched PopLlama, and how a DIY-mindset began a still-thriving four-decade career of triumphs and tumbles — some more literal than others. Compiled from over 12 hours of interviews conducted in-person, by phone, video call, and email, this definitive document tells the story of the band’s formation and first recordings. Hutchison, who McCaughey has referred to as the band’s “spiritual leader,” chose not to take part, but his singular presence is felt throughout. 

This is not the story of that “one band” who forever changed Seattle. This is the story of how two friends and a cousin went into a moldy garage lined with egg cartons and played some songs like they were the only thing in the world that mattered. 

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The Players:

The Young Fresh Fellows (Fabulous Sounds era):
Chuck Carroll (Lead guitar, vocals) 
Tad Hutchison (Drums, wardrobe) 
Scott McCaughey (Vocals, guitar, bass on Fabulous Sounds) 
Jim Sangster (Bass, joined post-recording) 

Kurt Bloch (YFF lead guitar 1989-present, Fastbacks, The Cheaters)
Lulu Gargiulo (Guitar and vocals, Fastbacks) 
Gary Norris (“Mr. Beatle of Saratoga,” member of Vannevar Bush, Hannibal’s Chorus Boys, The Empty Set)
Conrad Uno (PopLlama Products founder, Fabulous Sounds producer, bass in Uncle Cookie)

I: Come Together

Chuck Carroll (Young Fresh Fellows lead guitar, vocals): I grew up in California: the Bay Area, San Jose, and then Saratoga. I went to three different high schools, all in the same sort of area, and by the time I got to the third high school I was like, oh my gosh, I don’t know one person here. There was a sign up saying ‘Beatles fan club meeting after school.’ I was like, all right. I’ll go to that. 

Scott McCaughey (YFF vocals, guitar, bass on Fabulous Sounds): At Saratoga High School, me and my friend Gary Norris said let’s have this Beatles club after school, get credit for it or whatever. A lot of our friends came, but then some people who we didn’t know came because we put a little flier up for it. 

Gary Norris (“Mr. Beatle of Saratoga,” member of Vannevar Bush, Hannibal’s Chorus Boys, The Empty Set): Scott and I met in late ’68 or early ’69. He was very shy initially. The first day of freshman English he was about three rows behind me, and within a day or two he was right behind me. I think the magical connection was that I wanted to talk about John Lennon in English class, about his books, like In His Own Write. Scott and I wanted to meet other fans, so we did this quiz. You had to come to the library after school and take the quiz and it was really hard. It was really obscure, like, ‘What?! How would I know that?’ It couldn’t just be like, name the Beatles’ first names. That would be dumb. It had to be irritating. 

Chuck Carroll: Basically Gary just wanted to have a meeting and make sure that he knew more than anybody else about the Beatles. (laughs) 

Gary Norris: That’s how we met Chuck. Chuck really got into it. It wasn’t really cool yet to be into music, and especially at that pivotal time, the Beatles were on the way out for a lot of people. They were getting a little too weird.

Chuck Carroll: So I went and took the quiz and all that, but I really clicked with all these music people. 

Gary Norris: We realized that music was going to be our focus — girls, The Beatles, and collecting records — but then Scott started playing. He had talent. I didn’t think of him as a musician and then all of a sudden he started playing and he could read music.

Chuck Carroll: Scott and I were both starting on our instruments, but we were like, ‘Let’s just start a band!’ It’s not like we were good or anything. We were just having fun. 

Scott McCaughey: We started playing music at a very silly level. We had this group called Vannevar Bush & His Differential Analyzers, which was kind of noise music. If you played an instrument you had to switch to a different instrument that you were ‘unskilled’ at. 

Chuck Carroll: It was a very experimental, avant-garde, freak-out band. One of our friends, Dennis Berry, was a big music fan, but he didn’t play any instruments. I remember one performance he took a blanket solo. We’re like, ‘Take it, Dennis!’ And he had a blanket and he [mimics waving a blanket in musical fashion]. It was great. So that was that band. Legendary, really. 

Scott McCaughey: Dennis also played an electric gas can at an outdoor show one night. It was our take on “God Is Alive” by Wayne Newton. 

Gary Norris: We modeled ourselves after the Mothers of Invention — a real immature version of the Mothers of Invention — so we made noise and pounded on things. We would incorporate things you couldn’t hear. John Snow played eggbeater. 

Scott McCaughey: It was the first ever Earth Day (1970) and we were playing in the quad at Saratoga High. We were never asked to perform. The Falcon, the school newspaper, printed up, ‘The worst pollution on Earth Day was the noise pollution from Vannevar Bush & His Differential Analyzers.’ 

Gary Norris: People got upset because I wore underwear on my head at one show. Because that’s radical stuff, right? (laughs) 

Scott McCaughey: So we had that, and then the people in the band who wanted to do “normal” music started a band called Hannibal’s Chorus Boys, which was our rock ’n’ roll party combo. When we were doing Hannibal’s Chorus Boys, that was like 1972-73, everyone was into prog. We liked Yes, too, but we couldn’t play that. We were playing all the ’60s songs — “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Gloria” — and that stuff was totally uncool by that point. It was like five years old, but totally uncool. (laughs) 

Gary Norris: We did covers and originals that Scott wrote with John Weymer. I wasn’t very talented, but I had a pretty good voice. I sang “Come Together” and T. Rex’s “Get it On.” Chuck’s specialty in Hannibal’s Chorus Boys was “Secret Agent Man.” That was his big song and he would nail it.

Chuck Carroll: I guess the sequence would be Vannevar Bush, Hannibal’s Chorus Boys, Silver Creek. That was all still in Saratoga. Then we moved up to Sonoma County and we had The Sandbaggers. 

Scott McCaughey: Silver Creek was semi-simultaneous with Chorus Boys, but under the iron thumb of a fast-picking fiendish dude Bob Coleman from Arkansas. He had Brian McCarthy learning bass on the spot. You’d think we’d be kinda mellow with that name, but we played songs by The Mothers, Jethro Tull, Spirit! Then I went to San Francisco State, Chuck was at Sonoma State with Brian, and they met this cool drummer, Steve Taylor. We started The Sandbaggers. We were into the Eagles, country rock. Poco was my favorite group! We hadn’t really discovered pre-punk, but I was into Mott the Hoople. We played “I Wish I Was Your Mother” back then, in both Hannibal’s Chorus Boys and The Sandbaggers. That song has been with me forever. We also did “Sweet Jane” and a ten-minute song I wrote called “To The Weirdos.”

Chuck Carroll: All the while Scott’s writing songs.

Scott McCaughey: My wife [Christy McWilson] and I at the time, lived in this kind of rundown place in a little apartment complex in Cotati, right where Mike Bloomfield died. Slugs would come into our house. We couldn’t figure out how they were getting in. These two little kids would always come over asking for stuff and we’d give them money or whatever. We felt very sorry for them, especially Christy. They were friendly, but they were sad and grungy and weren’t really taken care of. I remember they brought us zucchinis one day. 

I was working as an ice cream man in Sonoma County one summer. I was driving around in a big old clunky truck — with a jingle of “Little Brown Jug” cranking through a bullhorn endlessly — and saw a little Datsun pickup that had ‘R&R Pest Control’ on the side of it. It was someone’s pest control company, but I was like, ‘R&R Pest Control… Rock ’N’ Roll Pest Control! Yes!’ Then the lyrics just came out. It’s all real stuff that really happened. I wouldn’t say it’s great poetry, but it works well in the song.

Chuck Carroll: [The Sandbaggers] would do kind of off-the-wall covers. We’d do songs that nobody had really heard of and they’d think, ‘Oh, they must have made up that song because I’ve never heard of it.’ Then for some reason we changed our name from Sandbaggers to Vic Paradise. I don’t know why. 

Scott McCaughey: We played around the Bay Area and it was great, but it was a really hard time to play. You had to pay to play, you had to sell like 100 tickets beforehand to get a gig. It was really weird, so we were like, fuck this. 

II: Seattle: It Seemed Like the Thing to Do at the Time

Chuck Carroll: There was a free magazine that came out fortnightly called BAM, Bay Area Music. It was all about the San Francisco Bay Area music scene, which was pretty substantial. Scott and I had the idea of starting a similar magazine in another area of the country. We actually spoke with the publisher of BAM, Dennis Erokan, and he was super great. He goes, ‘great, just do it! You sell advertising and get a lot of contributors.’ So I took a driving trip around the country. I started in Seattle and went to Minneapolis, Chicago, the East Coast, and Tucson — all these places. It would be so easy these days to search where are music magazines located? on the internet. I had to go to all these places and go to clubs and pubs and see if there was anything like BAM. So I come back after a few months of driving my VW bus around, and I go, ‘OK, Scott. I got it: Seattle.’

Scott McCaughey: The ones he liked for us were Tucson and Seattle. Tucson was where I lived as a kid, so that would’ve been really cool, but I’d never been to Seattle. I think the thing that swung it was there was a girl who I knew from the dorms at San Francisco State whose ex-boyfriend was living in Seattle and had a basement that we could live in for 100 dollars a month — total for the two of us. 

Chuck Carroll: He goes, ‘OK. [shrugs shoulders] Let’s go.’ So we moved all of our worldly possessions into the van and drove up to Seattle.

Scott McCaughey: Records and guitars. That’s pretty much all we brought with us. (laughs) This was the end of ’79. We moved up there at the end of November and I think the first day we got there we found they already had a music magazine, which had just started in the three months since Chuck had been there. 

Chuck Carroll: We went to The Rainbow Tavern and, lo and behold, there was the very first issue of The Rocket. I mean, it sounds made up, but I’m like, ‘Oh my God, this is exactly what we were gonna do!’

Scott McCaughey: We just went, well, let’s work with these people if they’ll have us. Chuck started selling ads for The Rocket and I started writing and collecting quarters in their newspaper boxes, which were all over Seattle. That’s a really good way to learn the city. There were like 200 of them and I had to find them while driving my ’66 Mercury Comet Caliente. (laughs) That was a good time. 

Chuck Carroll: The Rocket was part of this free monthly insert to a weekly newspaper called the Seattle Sun. So they’re like, ‘Yeah, we don’t know what we’re doing, just join us.’ 

Scott McCaughey: We lived on beer and whatever the cheapest food we could get was. A can of chili and beer was a meal. (laughs) Every Sunday we’d go to this place on 45th called Goldie’s. They had quarter hot dogs and dollar pitchers. So every week we were waiting for that and we’d go with our five dollars and get like four hot dogs and four pitchers of beer and spend the whole afternoon there, well into the evening. Goldie’s. That was amazing.

Chuck Carroll: We got an instant network of friends, and we’d get invited to all the art gallery openings, and all the shows, and interview bands. It was great. It was kind of wide open. 

Scott McCaughey: I have to admit this. When I was still in the Bay Area, all our Kinks fan-gang would have record parties. Kevin Walsh brought The Sonics BOOM LP to spin. In hindsight, it was definitely the most rockin’ record I’d ever heard, but it confused me. It sounded so unrefined, I mean, compared to The Beatles and Jackson Browne. But I’m thankful to Kevin for that early exposure. Because nobody outside the Northwest had ever heard that shit. I was ready to go full-on into the Northwest garage sound when I got up there. 

Kurt Bloch (YFF lead guitar 1989-present, Fastbacks, The Cheaters): Scott worked at Cellophane Square,¹ which was the used record store in the University District. It was kind of the hangout for people in bands and stuff like that. We were buddies, especially from the record store because that’s where you’d go to listen to music. They were always playing something killer on the stereo.

I remember being at Tower Records in downtown Seattle, seeing Scott there, and giving him a copy of The Cheaters 45, which didn’t come out until after we’d already broken up, unfortunately.

Scott McCaughey: I was like, ‘Wow, you’re making your own 45? That’s cool, man. How do you do that?’ Chuck and I were talking about making a record. Here’s a guy who already knows how to do it. He was already DIY. He and Lulu [Gargiulo] were hanging out and [making] the Cheaters 45 and it was so cool.

Chuck Carroll: Scott brought his wife Christy up when she called and was like, ‘What are you guys doing?’ And he’s like, ‘Oh yeah, come on up!’ Within a couple years, less than that, they started a band called The Dynette Set. Scott played bass in that band. They were great.

Scott McCaughey: The first band I played in in Seattle was The Dynette Set, which was my wife and two other girls — Riki Mafune and first Penta Swanson, then Shelley Stockstill — who were the singers. The record (Rockers and Recliners, 1983) is not very representative of what we were, but it’s pretty cool. Our thing was a ’60s girl group thing, but we weren’t trying to make it sound like Phil Spector. It was more like the Stones with three girls singing. 

Lulu Gargiulo (Fastbacks): Live, they were just super fun. They were really good vocalists. They all had their own personality and style and they would bring out a really good, regular crowd. I love that band. It’s not my kind of music, but it was just easy and fun. 

Kurt Bloch: I know The Dynette Set’s first show was a hall show with The Fastbacks. During that era of Seattle, 1980-81, there were no venues that we [Fastbacks] could play at. There were bars and rock club bars that had bands that played songs that everybody knew. That’s not necessarily to say these were ‘cover bands.’ Sort of, I suppose, but they played music that people liked, and a lot of those bands had their own songs. The Dynette Set found their club scene and were able to make a living playing shows, which is something we would have loved to have done, but it wasn’t gonna happen, especially in 1981.

Lulu Gargiulo: It was hard. You really couldn’t play unless you put on your own show. So we would do that. I think I even bought a PA, and I used to build the stages sometimes. I’m pretty crafty and I was then. So you’d get a hall and you’d build the stage. They weren’t very good, but the whole idea was just community, right? 

Conrad Uno (PopLlama Products founder, Fabulous Sounds producer, bass in Uncle Cookie): I mowed lawns for little old ladies for a living at the time. I had a band in the ’70s called Uncle Cookie that was a pretty strange outfit. Then my other main band was The New Vitations. Through these bands I ended up with PA gear. Back then, you had to have a PA if you wanted to play anywhere. When bands broke up I would get their microphones, and this and that. I figured out you can use that stuff to record as well. To augment my mowings, I was doing sound for my friends’ bands and I got better at that as a year or two went by. Then I met The Dynette Set and did sound for them a couple times. Scott and I hit it off basically because of tequila. 

Scott McCaughey: Uno did sound at the Rainbow Tavern. The Fabulous Rainbow Tavern was the greatest venue. He would do sound for The Dynette Set and we obviously got along with him really well because he was a really awesome guy and we liked tequila. 

III: Learn by Doing

Kurt Bloch: Scott was pretty much doing everything. He worked at the right record store, he had the band, and it all started pretty quickly. 

Scott McCaughey: Chuck and I bought a four-track Tascam reel-to-reel 3340 and started spending all of our free time — we had a lot of free time — recording songs. A lot of those songs turned into the Fellows’ first record. 

Jimmy Silva was the first guy I knew who had a four-track, and he taught me how to record and overdub, things like that. I knew him from San Francisco, but he moved back and forth from Seattle the whole time we were there. We had a thing called The Empty Set, which was a conceptual group that Jimmy, Eddy Irvine, Gary Norris, Dennis Diken, and I made up. It was a way to learn how to write songs and pretend we were making records.

Gary Norris: Jimmy was in the Navy. Eddy Irvine was his best friend. We met Eddy and a bunch of other soon-to-be-friends at a two-night-stand the Kinks did at Winterland. Eddy moved to the east coast and met Dennis Diken. At a Kinks show, naturally. The Empty Set was just fun because it was folk rock and nonsense. It was really just us making little home tapes. Dennis ended up in The Smithereens. 

Scott McCaughey: I didn’t know how we were gonna pay for a record. We didn’t have any money. Chuck and I are both… we could be pretty thrifty. And Chuck is worse than me. We’d smuggle beers into shows in our sports coats so we didn’t have to buy beers because that would be too expensive — they were probably a dollar back then. We always wore our sports coats that we got for 50 cents at Goodwill. We thought it would cost us like a thousand dollars in a recording studio, which wouldn’t have bought very much. 

I didn’t have a support system for my songs, except for Chuck. Chuck didn’t really write songs, but he loved playing guitar, and he loved singing, and we sang together. I was kind of on a roll then. I was starting to get the gist of songwriting. It was flowing for sure. Maybe because it was more exciting because I had the idea that we were going to do something with [the songs]. 

Chuck Carroll: He would just come to a practice and go, ‘well, here’s a song.’ And it was kind of that way all through the Fellows. 

Scott McCaughey: We got the idea for the Fellows tapes because we’d done the Empty Set tapes. Chuck and I had done a cassette that we sent out to our friends, like 20 copies, in 1981. The first Fellows demo tape had five or six songs: “Fellows Theme,” “Power Mowers Theme,” “Rock ’N’ Roll Pest Control,” definitely “No One Really Knows,” which we didn’t end up doing until Totally Lost (1988), way later. At least a couple other ones. It’s probably kind of embarrassing, but we had the whole concept already: the cover, the narration, all that. 

Chuck Carroll: The whole thing [the cover concept, title, and in-album narration] was actually a 45 that I found in a Goodwill. It was a seven-inch, but it was pretty much this exact thing [holds up the Fellows’ Fabulous Sounds]. It was a tourism advertisement put out by the Bell System called The Fabulous Sounds of the Pacific Northwest. So we put some different pictures on the cover, some pictures are the same. I think the two guys eating pizza were the same. 

Scott McCaughey: Chuck found it and we were like, ‘Well, it’s the phone company, will we get sued? (laughs) Nah! Nobody’s ever going to hear it anyway. Don’t worry about it!’ And now I’m still not worrying about it. 

Conrad Uno: Scott gave me a cassette that he and Chuck had recorded. Unbelievably funny and cool. I couldn’t listen to it enough. Eventually he asked me if I wanted to record this album that he and Chuck had. I said sure, if I get to put it out. 

Scott McCaughey: We were looking at this studio called Crow, it was 16-track, and Uno was like, ‘Well, if you want to do it, I’ll record you for free if you put it out on my label.’ Deal! Sounds great! It just made perfect sense. 

Conrad Uno: I really liked Scott, and maybe it was just tequila that made me say that, I don’t know. I didn’t have a record label. I kind of did. I’d put out a couple of singles at that point and Christmas tapes. But it was a good idea. I mean, for Chrissake, that moment gave me a career. 

Chuck Carroll: Uno was the perfect guy for us. Uncle Cookie was kind of legendary and we were like, yeah, this is gonna work out. 

Kurt Bloch: Not having any money makes you have to figure out how to do it yourself. Uno was very much that guy. I imagine he didn’t know anything about recording when he started. He just plugged stuff in in his basement and learned by doing. 

Conrad Uno: The word ‘PopLlama’ came out of the basement at a big party. I was out in the front yard, on the street, and someone came running up and said, ‘Carol (a former girlfriend of mine) just said this amazing word: PopLlama!’ I think Scott was there with me and he just said, ‘well, there you go.’ Been waiting for that.

Scott McCaughey: He was getting into it, charging people to record a demo, a 45, whatever. But I think we were the first real, serious project he did. He really helped us. It helped to have somebody listening who wasn’t you. (laughs) 

IV: Tad and Jim Go West

Chuck Carroll: My cousin Tad [Hutchison, YFF drummer 1983-2023, now retired] grew up in Iowa. I didn’t really know him but he had made a record with this group called The Law in Des Moines. I thought that’s pretty cool, he has an EP out (King Size Cigarette, 1980). He was graduating from Colorado College and he was also in a band in Colorado with Jim Sangster. 

Jim Sangster (YFF Bass): [Tad and I] went to college in 1979, I think. I ended up on a performing arts wing. The first person I met on the bus from the airport was Doug Pray because he had a guitar as well. He later made the Seattle rock-doc Hype! There was a guy who was a year ahead of us named Mike Ritt who was kind of scoping out the new recruits. I had a guitar and I was into punk rock and New Wave so he was like, ‘OK, you’re going to be in a band with me.’ So he put an ad in the school paper and Tad answered. I met Tad probably about a month into going to school there. So we started a band that year that turned into Fun at the Zoo. We were just a college rock band that played a bunch of covers and songs that Mike Ritt wrote. Mike and I played guitar. 

Tad was pretty hilarious. One of the funniest things is he couldn’t remember my name for about six months. He was like, ‘Git, git… guitar player! You! Guitar player!’ He was sort of fresh from The Law and we heard all those recordings, which are amazing. Both “(My Friend) Ringo” and “Where Is Groovy Town” were Law songs that Charlie Chesterman wrote. We were pretty excited about that band. Tad was hilarious, and young, and wild. And weird (laughs), as he is. We had a lot of fun. 

We ended up recording a four-song EP (Grow Up!, 1981) at a local studio in Colorado Springs. We put it out on a label [Fly-Girl Records] that had put out The Law. It’s pretty great power pop, New Wave, whatever, energetic, melodic. We ended up recording another EP, another three songs, that never came out. We played a lot of shows at school and around Colorado Springs.

Scott McCaughey: Chuck had gone to see Tad on his trip around the country. He was playing with The Law then. Chuck was like, ‘Tad’s in a really good band and he wants to play if we’re gonna make a record.’ I was like, well, that would be awesome. 

Jim Sangster: I think during our senior year Chuck and Scott started sending cassettes to Tad, which we listened to a lot. That’s the first time I became aware of those guys. I don’t think I knew too much about them before. Toward the end of that year they said, ‘Hey, we’re going to make a record. Tad, come out and play drums!’ 

Chuck Carroll: I called him up and asked what are you doing after college? He goes, ‘Oh, nothing.’ ‘OK, why don’t you come out and be in a band with me and Scott?’ ‘OK!’ And mind you, Scott doesn’t know him, and I barely know him, so he comes out in his limousine. Tad had a limousine at the time because it could hold his drums.

Jim Sangster: We ended up driving together from Colorado back to Seattle in the ‘Ghost Limo,’ as it was called. It was a late-’60s, early-’70s Cadillac limousine that we completely filled with a drum set, guitar amps, records, everything that we had from four years at Colorado. At the top of Snoqualmie Pass it overheated and we coasted down to Issaquah into a gas station and we were stuck. (laughs) I think my parents maybe came and rescued us and we came and got the car the next day, but that was our return to Seattle. 

Conrad Uno in Fellows Wear Monthly #1 (A Young Fresh Fellows zine, Dec. 1984): Saturday, June 11: Tad breezed into town today, his Fleetwood limo gasping from its non-stop haul from Colorado Springs. He had listened to Scott’s songs on a tape his cousin Chuck sent him and came as quick as he could. 

Mastermind Scott McCaughey, a keen observer of life in the fast lane… Chuck Carroll, melodic and understated, yet combustible with guitar in hand.. the frenzied Tad Hutchison who has trouble finding two socks, let alone ones that match… these ARE the Young Fresh Fellows. 

Chuck Carroll: We got together for a couple practices in [Uno’s] basement. Scott had all these new songs and we just kind of ran through them. 

Scott McCaughey: Our getting to know each other was by playing music together. I’d never played with a drummer like Tad before. He was so good, so energetic, and so excited. Just amazing. It immediately felt like I had known him forever. 

Chuck Carroll: I just thought, wow, this guy’s really good. And he’s also really wacky — I don’t know how he plays. I’ve never seen anybody like that. But he plays great and he has all these antics. He’s such a funstigator. He’s just out for it. 

Conrad Uno: What they were was the most ridiculously funny, goofy little group of guys that I have ever been around. They were just on fire all the time. Chuck and Scott had this long history of having developed their own language and sense of humor, and Tad just sent that through the roof. I love that kind of stuff. I am not the funniest guy in the world, but they were. 

V: Is This Thing On? Capturing The Fabulous Sounds of the Pacific Northwest 

Conrad Uno: The most fun I’m ever going to have, and the best recordings I’m ever going to make are — and I don’t know much about the rest of the world, or anything like that — but for me, it’s the ones where I can help, I can be the fifth member, I can be the catalyst to getting them comfortable enough to just not care — to just play. 

Chuck Carroll: I think we were Uno’s first victims. In other words, he just goes, ‘Well, I’m not going to charge you, but I’ll just learn along with you.’

Conrad Uno: There was a band in Seattle called Red Dress. They were fantastic and I loved them very much. And I knew that if I didn’t figure out a way to record them, they would slip into the past. So I figured out how to put together a little room in my crummy basement — it was the worst basement ever — and recorded them. 

I then recorded a band for money in between mowing lawns. I charged them 10 dollars an hour. That kind of made me think, ‘Well, shoot. I can do something. I’ve got a tape recorder now and a few microphones.’ I didn’t have any speakers or a mixer. I had to borrow those. 

Chuck Carroll: It was very relaxed, very low budget. I think it was called Egg because there’s a lot of egg cartons on the walls. 

Conrad Uno: My great friend Ernie Sapiro, who was in Uncle Cookie and The New Vitations with me, worked at Red Robin. He brought home stacks of those freestanding square egg cartons. So we put them everywhere. They covered the whole studio. 

Scott McCaughey: The studio was in Uno’s basement-garage. There’s a couple pictures of it in the reissue. It was a pretty awesome place that got good sounds. To his credit, the recording was pretty good. We may not have known what we were doing, but Conrad did a good job. 

Conrad Uno: I was trying to keep up. I was faking being able to record. I had done a little bit, but it was mostly painstaking work trying to do it. With this it was like, OK, there’s sounds coming through the microphone. That was a take. It was great. Very spontaneous would be the word. 

Jim Sangster: Uno’s was definitely shackled together. It was a real party atmosphere making that record. There was lots of cheap beer and tequila drinking and hilarity. And Uno, what can you say? How can you not love him? He’s kind of like a guru. He’s got such a positive attitude. And obviously the songs were great.

Scott McCaughey: I don’t feel like we had that thing where you’re like, ‘hey, we’re making a record. We gotta really get down to it.’ I mean, we were serious about trying to get good recordings, but we were just drinking and having fun, really. There wasn’t any pressure. We weren’t getting charged studio time, we didn’t think anybody was ever going to hear the record except for our select friends who we were going to give it to. It was just really loose. There’s not more than two takes of any song. 

Conrad Uno: For me, this was just heaven, because I had very little experience with that kind of an approach, but I loved it. I wanted the first take of everything to be the album. It didn’t matter if it had mistakes or flaws that someone could point out. To me, they were such a living, live entity as they learned their songs and played them with each other. I don’t know, it was jazz, man. (laughs)

Chuck Carroll: It was kind of open-ended because, again, we were learning and there was nobody else in line going, ‘OK guys, move along.’ We were just there. But I think we did it pretty quickly and it was mostly in the evenings. We did a few overdubs but not that many. 

Scott McCaughey: I think we tracked the songs with me playing bass, then I overdubbed whatever guitar I did, usually. We knew by the time the record came out that Jim was in the band, but I can’t remember why he didn’t play. 

Jim Sangster: I think that Scott and Chuck had made demos of those songs playing bass and guitar and they had a plan. They were doing it. There wasn’t really a band that I was a part of at that point, so I was happy to be hanging out and be a part of it. 

Chuck Carroll: We didn’t know the name of the group so we had three themes. The Monkees had a theme, so we had to have a theme right off the bat. So one is “Gus Theme.” We thought maybe that’ll be the name of the band, Gus. Or “Young Fresh Fellows Theme,” or “Power Mowers Theme.”² I mean, what album has three themes on it?

Scott McCaughey: A friend of mine from Germany was visiting us in Sonoma County. We were playing guitars and he said, ‘You are such young, fresh fellows.’ We all laughed and said that’s really funny. So that was where “Young Fresh Fellows Theme” came from. It sounded wrong. And I don’t know why it sounds wrong. I don’t know why ‘Fresh Young’ should sound more right, but it does, and everyone would always transpose our name. It still happens. Marquees. Posters. 

Chuck Carroll: Gus would have been pretty cool. But the Fellows are great because everyone just says ‘the Fellows.’ Kind of friendly. It’s not really cool. It’s not really, maybe, even grammatically right. People always would say the ‘Fresh Young Fellows.’ And then The Fine Young Cannibals came out and so that was kind of a shitshow. (laughs) I mean, a more normal name would have been the Power Mowers. And then some friends of ours did name a band the Power Mowers, so whatever. 

Lulu Gargiulo: I was in the Power Mowers. I loved playing in that band because it was the only band I ever played bass in. My memory is that it was almost all covers and that it was a precursor to Christy and Blackie’s band The Picketts [with Jim Sangster]. I can’t even remember who else played in the Power Mowers. But it was so much fun to play bass.³ It didn’t last a super long time. 

Chuck Carroll: A lot of the songs came together in the studio. People would come up with a different part, or, certainly, harmonies. We would just run through it a few times and we’d go, ‘yeah, that sounds pretty good. Let’s record it.’ And Uno would record stuff and we might not even know it because we were apt to do a really good take any old time, pretty much live. It was very much a democratic thing. If someone had a part, it would be looked at and usually accepted. 

Scott McCaughey: We wanted songs that would be fun to play live, which tend to be fast and fun songs. Typically when you’ve recorded a song you end up playing it way, way faster when you do it live — you get more ramped and you’re not really thinking about it. That wasn’t the case with this record. That record was on fire, right out of the get-go. 

Chuck Carroll: If you put a metronome to it, every single song speeds up. If you take the song at the beginning and at the end, you’re like, whoa! Just because we were so excited. 

Scott McCaughey: We weren’t worried about perfection, which just kind of ruins things if you do. I still feel that way. Can you imagine, oh, we can’t use that take because it picks up, it gets faster. That was not an issue! (laughs)

Conrad Uno: The songs lent themselves, sometimes, to super goofiness. But mostly it was just they would work on the song and Tad would try to take it through the roof in some Tad way. And everything morphed. I remember there wasn’t much rehearsing. It was more like, here’s the song. Let’s try to play it. Working on parts is so overrated.

Chuck Carroll: I would plan a few little parts, but when it came to playing solos, it was just panic time. (laughs) We just did it. Just record it and be done with it. 

Kurt Bloch: Chuck’s absolutely going ballistic on guitar. It’s his first record and he’s playing like he’s not worried about a thing in the world.

Chuck Carroll: It wasn’t super polished. We didn’t know it was going to be anything. We were just having fun. 

Scott McCaughey: “Down By the Pharmacy” was an early example of me not worrying too much about the meaning of the song and just going with it. It was more a stream-of-consciousness kind of thing, which I still do often. I made up a little surreal story and the words sounded good to me. [Sample lyric: ‘Open the icebox baby / Take out the cheese / Cut off the moldy parts / And tape them to your knees’] I always liked those lyrics. And I don’t ever sing them exactly the same when I do them live.

Jim Sangster: I love “Big House.” It’s such a Mott the Hoople song.

Scott McCaughey: I co-wrote “Big House” and “Empty Set Takes a Vacation” with Jimmy Silva. We came up with “Empty Set Takes A Vacation” together, but I just wrote a few lyrics for “Big House.” Jimmy eventually got heavily involved in the Seattle scene and made records for PopLlama with Uno. Before that we’d make those Christmas tapes. I think “Think Better of Me” was on one. “Empty Set Takes A Vacation” is about us and all of our friends. All those people who are mentioned in it are real people. Dr. Jim is Jimmy Silva. Sled Dog is me. Nordog is Gary Norris. Captain Stan is a friend of ours in Saratoga where Gary and I grew up.⁴ The story is just a fantasy, like us ‘Having A Wild Weekend’ with the Dave Clark 5. ‘It seemed like the thing to do at the time’ was our modus operandi — and still is.

Chuck Carroll: I think “Teenage Dogs in Trouble” was a rock opera, maybe, I don’t know. 

Scott McCaughey: Gary Norris wrote this song called “City Dog,” and he gave me a cassette where he made up all these other songs that weren’t really songs. It was a rock opera about a dog who is lonely and living on the streets. 

Gary Norris: It was a really pathetic, emo thing. I had just moved to San Francisco and I decided I was gonna be Leonard Cohen or something. I was into ballads. Scott wrote “Teenage Dogs in Trouble” for City Dog, which was an opera about homeless dogs in the city. I never finished it, but the good thing that came out of it was “Teenage Dogs.”

Scott McCaughey: The original version was slower, a bluesy thing, then of course it went crazy with Tad. I had forgotten that I played lead guitar on it. All the really noisy shit is me, according to the track sheets, at least.

Conrad Uno: One of the most memorable things was a song called “View From Above.” It had a very carnival feel to it. I set up a mic in what we’ll call the main room, which was, well, anyway. There was another mic around through the hallway, way back by the furnace, which was in another room entirely. So I turned on the tape recorder and told everybody to run shouting as if they were on a roller coaster, then run back. That was outrageously funny to watch, and it turned out pretty cool. I really enjoyed that. And they willingly did it. 

Scott McCaughey: We did an overdub on it, two tracks of us running around in the studio making weird noises and just banging on things. I had a cassette player playing an Art Pepper record, things like that. Jim was there when we did that. 

Jim Sangster: I do play trumpet on “A View From Above.” And I can’t play trumpet, but I was part of the noise.

Scott McCaughey: That’s a weird, weird song. It had been around for a while. I always liked the words to it, but we didn’t really know what to do with it. There’s no chorus! It’s just four verses and the verses are done probably a little less than a minute into the song. Because we just went so fast. I think we probably just did one take of it and were like, ‘eh, that’s cool.’ (laughs) It ended up being almost like a ska thing, which I never envisioned. But it was easy to sequence. It had to be at the end of a side so you can turn it off if you don’t want it. (laughs) 

Chuck Carroll: That’s kind of a crazy one. I know Scott played a typewriter on that one. That was kind of our “Revolution 9.” Can you imagine if we led off with that song? 

Scott McCaughey: It took three or four months of piddling around with [the record] and doing whatever we could to do overdubs. We brought in The Dynette Set to ‘sing golden,’ as Tad would call it. There weren’t a lot, but it took a while for us to finish it, and to mix it, because what’s mixing? (laughs) I guess that takes some time, I don’t know. 

VI: I Fought the Lawn and… 

Scott McCaughey: We finished the record, we finally decided it’s mixed. It’s sequenced. We didn’t have the physical record yet, but we had a party at Uno’s to invite everybody over to hear what we’d been doing. We were really proud, really excited. So we played it probably 10 fucking times or something that night. But a lot of people came over. I got there pretty early and I was really excited, having a great time, drinking tequila — Cuervo Gold, which was the best tequila back then. (laughs) It makes me sick to think about it now. (laughs) 

Conrad Uno: Well, the night was somewhat altered by different fermented beverages.

Scott McCaughey: I got super, super wasted and everybody’s going, ‘This is amazing! You guys made this record!’ And I was feeling really proud and having a great time. At some point I ended up getting… not feeling very good. I was outside in the front yard. I went and passed out in the bushes. And Tad arrived really late at the party. He came with a new girl that he met, and they’re walking up the steps to the door and she goes, ‘Who’s that over there in the bushes?’ Tad goes, ‘Oh! That’s our lead singer!’ And they just went into the party. (laughs) 

Conrad Uno: My little house at the time that I rented was on a side hill. You went up a couple steps to the front yard, but then over on the west side it fell down into the driveway. It was a pretty good drop, eight to 10 feet. 

Scott McCaughey: I’m completely out of it and they’re all there, still raging. Uno had his truck parked in the driveway, and his truck was a big, old, super funky pickup filled with edgers, lawn mowers, and every kind of gardening equipment. At some point I woke up and was staggering around and I fell off the precipice of the yard and landed in the back of his truck, on top of all these frickin’ lawnmowers and shit like that. I mean, I don’t know how I survived it. 

Conrad Uno: He just wandered off the edge of the thing, and I didn’t see how he landed or where he landed. I did have a little truck that was probably full of nice, soft grass. So if he landed in there, God love it. It was probably a really great thing for the world because he could have broken his neck. He just came off the edge and we all went, ‘WHAT?!’ 

Scott McCaughey: Eventually they got me out of there, and I remember at like five in the morning, I’m still throwing up in the middle of his living room on the carpet. My wife was there, and she’s like, fucking hell. She ends up taking me home, surprisingly. I’m surprised she didn’t leave me there. I remember the next day I was sleeping on the couch, that’s for sure. She was so mad. But I was so miserable that she actually couldn’t stay mad at me. I couldn’t even move. My whole body was just fucking ruined, inside and out. So that probably should have told me how my life was going to go being in the Young Fresh Fellows. (laughs) 

VII: Taking the Stage — In Style 

The Rocket (“The Northwest Basement Tapes” by Charles R. Cross, June 1984): The Fabulous Sounds of the Pacific Northwest, the debut album by the Young Fresh Fellows, is sort of a homegrown Basement Tapes — it shares with that recording both low fidelity sound and an easygoing attitude that’s perfect for the material. These 15 songs were recorded under similar circumstances — in somebody’s living room/studio — and while they lack something in hi fi and sonic polish they are some of the most inspired and well crafted songs to come out of the Northwest in many years.

Jim Sangster: They made the record and then were like, ‘Hey, we should have a band now that we have a record.’ (laughs) So I was hanging out and they asked, ‘Do you want to do the band?’ Yeah. Absolutely. 

Chuck Carroll: Jim switched to bass and that was it. 

Jim Sangster: The first couple practices I played guitar and Scott was the bass player, primarily. I think after a couple practices he was like, ‘It’s too hard to be the singer and the bass player.’ I had never played bass. It took awhile for me to feel like I was actually playing bass and not just playing guitar on the low notes. 

Chuck Carroll: Instead of having a cassette, we figured our calling card to try playing clubs would be to have an album. So we printed off 500 copies and just kind of went to clubs and went, ‘We want to play here.’ And they’re like, ‘Oh, you have an album? OK, you can play here.’ They didn’t even know what kind of music it was or anything. And then we played a lot of frat parties and clubs around town. 

Scott McCaughey: We were one of the first bands that actually got a following doing mostly originals. There weren’t very many bands that were doing that, except for punk bands like Fastbacks, The U-Men, and The Heats. 

The first two shows we played were at parties. We had a party at the house that Jim and Tad lived in in Fremont. Jim’s dad’s bluegrass band opened that show. Then we played this other place called the Big House. Our first public show was at the Rainbow Tavern. It was like December 22 or 23, 1983, Christmas, and Jim didn’t play because he had to go to San Francisco to break up with his longtime girlfriend. So Johnny Sangster, his brother, played the first public show. Which is weird because Jim got back in time for the show, but we’d rehearsed with Johnny, so Johnny played most of the bass. Then Jim got up and played guitar on a couple songs, or maybe played with a wig without even being plugged in. 

Chuck Carroll: We were, and everybody always says this: ‘quirky.’ 

Scott McCaughey: I think there’s a picture of us at that first Rainbow Tavern show and we’re all wearing matching yellow turtlenecks, which I’m sure was Tad’s idea. It was like, oh. OK. I’ve never worn a fucking turtleneck, but we’re going on stage for our first show wearing matching yellow turtlenecks. Really good look, by the way. (laughs) 

Kurt Bloch: I think the quote was always ‘…Outfits?’

Scott McCaughey: Before a show we’d be going, ‘What songs should we start with?’ Then Tad would be like, ‘…Outfits? What about outfits?’ He was worried about, ‘What are we gonna look like? What are we gonna come up with?’ 

Chuck Carroll: We’d be backstage and he’d go, ‘We gotta go get some outfits. We gotta tape some cups to us or something’ — something! — so it’ll be out of the ordinary.

Kurt Bloch: Tad would drive around aimlessly and go into thrift stores and the idea was if you go into a thrift store and there’s two of something, consider buying it. If there’s four of something, absolutely buy it. Doesn’t matter what they were or what size they were, if there were four of anything, you’re buying them and bringing them to the show. And, obviously, duct tape is very useful. 

Scott McCaughey: I tended to go along with Tad, even if I knew it was a bad idea. I was more amenable than Chuck was, maybe because Chuck had more of a refined look. He would tuck in his shirt, you know? I’d never done that before. (laughs) He would have a nice tie and a suit coat, things like that. Still really colorful and weird, but he looked more like a respectable guy with really wild taste. 

Kurt Bloch: The Young Fresh Fellows were a pretty popular club band right off the bat. They played well and had mostly original music but played ’60s cover tunes and stuff like that that sounded good to the club owners and the club patrons. So they were off and running pretty quickly as a pretty good draw.

​​Lulu Gargiulo: Every show was fun. I’ve always been a really big fan of drummers. Tad [was] just mesmerizing. He’s obviously a mad genius. Someone could compare him to someone like Keith Moon because there were many times where you’re like, holy shit. 

Kurt Bloch: Everybody in that band was great, but Tad was stellar. He was just like nobody else, an unstoppable, party rock drummer. 

​​Lulu Gargiulo: He’s a whirling dervish. And it’s not just Tad, it’s that the group is able to maintain the sanity with Tad being so in his own orbit. Maybe that’s why it’s so much fun to see them. There is a bit of that wild unknown — what are they going to pull out? 

Chuck Carroll: I’d be playing and looking at all these people and they’d be pointing at Tad. I’m going, yeah, I’m missing this! I need to look at Tad more often! What’s he doing now? Because what I heard was a great drummer. And I’d look at him and he’d be [air drums with elbow extended skyward at an unnatural 90-degree angle] and making crazy faces. The show didn’t detract from the playing — that’s for sure. 

The Rocket (“The Northwest Basement Tapes” by Charles R. Cross, June 1984): The Fellows fall short in one sense: given the choice between emotional power and good natured joshing, they always choose the light-hearted approach. For the most part that’s what this material demands for this is first and foremost a record about rockin’ out. 

Jim Sangster: People were like, ‘Is this a joke? Is this a comedy band? What kind of music are we dealing with here?’ There’s no question that we could only have been what we were, which was kind of a scatterbrained approach, but we take playing music seriously. We think everything we do is good and we want it to be great. 

Scott McCaughey: I didn’t think of us as being a funny band. I figured we’re going to play these songs and our band became the band that played those songs. It just made sense that we were a fun band. It just happened. That’s the thing to do. Just have fun.

Kurt Bloch: We’d go see the Fellows all the time and it was like, ‘Those are our friends and they have a real album out!’ We loved Fabulous Sounds and all the songs on it. They sent it to radio stations and some stations played it. 

Scott McCaughey: It was really great when we started because we weren’t expecting anything. Uno was the one who started that by sending the record out. (laughs) But I’m glad he did.

Conrad Uno: The word on the street was that there was this thing called college radio that would play your record if you sent it to them. I now had an album that said PopLlama on it. We sent Fabulous Sounds to 80 stations and, in its own little way, it caught fire across the country. And that allowed them, and me included, to go on tour and play in these college towns. It was fantastic. I remember all of us sitting in my living room packaging up the records. Tad came up with the idea of putting a paper plate in with the records. So instead of some fancy schmancy stuff in there you had a paper plate that said something like ‘please play me.’ I can’t really take much credit for promoting anything because I was terrible at it. I really shouldn’t have had a record label, except that, had I not, there’s quite a few things that the world wouldn’t have in it that I’m glad it does. 

Chuck Carroll: The ploy sort of worked because we did get some shows. We promo’d all the records but I don’t think we really got out of town much. 

Scott McCaughey: We got this Top-30 playlist from, what was it called… KIUS Indiana University, Bloomington. We were No. 1. We were like, whoa, what?! They had written that it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. They were really into it. We called them up and asked them how this happened, and they said, ‘We love the record, you gotta come out here and play!’ Of course, we’re thinking, ‘We should go out there and play!’ (laughs) not having any idea how to tour. And it took until 1985 until we actually got out there. But our first tour was built on people like that. 

VIII: We Had One More Important Sound We Wanted You to Hear

Kurt Bloch: If there’s one thing that the first version of Fabulous Sounds is missing, it’s any sort of bass guitar. We knew that right away. You can sort of hear it, but there’s just no low end. Whatever happened, we don’t know. But that was the known issue with that record — which seems weird because Uno was a bass player and Scott was playing the bass. So it’s weird that it was made by two bass players, but there’s no bass on it. 

Conrad Uno: I’ll explain it the best I can… Like I said, I borrowed speakers. I think the speakers we mixed on were little bookshelf speakers that Chuck brought from home. They were in a damp basement control room, we’ll call it. The door to the control room was a garage door that opened out into a driveway that never saw sunlight. It was on the back side of a hill that was damp. There were mushrooms growing under the couch we had in there. Not trying to make excuses, particularly, but I’ll tell you what: near as I could tell, the bass was in the mix really good. But the speakers were lying. I didn’t know enough to cross reference it with anything or find some better speakers. It’s just what we had. By God, you get the album back — big moment — and you spin it and your mind is saying “I can’t really hear the bass.” Someone says, “Can you hear the bass?” And since there’s nothing to be done about it, you say, “Oh yeah, I can hear the bass…” But clearly there was almost no bass audible. (laughs) 

Jim Sangster: It was early learning how to make records. When they were mixing — and I was there — the bass playing was great on it. Scott’s a great bass player. Listening to the remaster now I wish I’d had this record to learn the bass parts. (laughs) There’s parts that I still play on those songs that I thought I had learned from the record, but they’re totally not what Scott played. (laughs) 

Conrad Uno: It’s one of those weird little things and, you know, if I were a religious man, I would thank God that the bass didn’t come through. The weird way that album sounded, just a mumble of bass somewhere you couldn’t hear, kind of caught the ear of goofy college radio programmers. It made it seem like some strange kind of folk rock. What the hell is that? But that was appealing because the songs were so great and the playing was so great. It didn’t matter so much right at that moment. 

Jim Sangster: It sort of adds to the charm of that record. With all the narration that’s stolen and stuff, it’s very much a throwback in a way. It sounds like a great party record coming out of an AM radio on a beach somewhere. But it’s really a great rock ’n’ roll record.

Scott McCaughey: It’s so funny that people got into Fabulous Sounds because it’s such a weird record. It sounds like it was made by people who didn’t really know what they were doing, and that’s kind of the case. But something about that makes it really, really awesome. One of the things that’s really cool about it is that Uno mixed the acoustic guitars really loud. I’ve always loved songs that are really rockin’ with really loud acoustic guitars. It makes it more unusual. Now that I’ve remixed it, I’m wondering if it’s not going to be as likable. 

The main difference is the bass. I was kinda worried when I started remastering it because I was like, ‘I don’t even know what I played on this.’ I figured it would just be the exact same as the guitar, but my bass playing was actually way better than I could have ever imagined. But the guitars are a little punchier. 

We took the narration off of the new version. I just thought people have that. If they want it they can listen to it. I read where some people were saying, ‘You might want to make a playlist of this without the narration because it gets kind of annoying.’ I don’t think it’s annoying because they’re really short and they’re really funny, but I just decided to take them off to let the record be what it is, straight on. Some of these songs fade out on the original record, but I didn’t do any fadeouts for the remaster. I just let everything go to the end. Of course, when Kurt masters stuff, like we always do, the songs are just bam-bam-bam! It jumps right in. 

Kurt Bloch: It stands as a separate but equal volume in the Young Fresh Fellows world. It’s always hard to do something like this because, for people who love that record and have listened to it a million times, to get a remix, there’s gonna be something that somebody’s gonna miss or think is wrong or whatever. But it was only recorded on eight tracks, so there’s not a whole lot of things that would be in there that weren’t in the other one or anything like that. I think it’s a really good piece of work. And I haven’t gone back and listened to the original Fab Sounds, although I did have a copy that I was looking at when we were working on the sleeve design and stuff. 

Jim Sangster: I’ve been thinking with the whole 40-year thing, it’s kind of crazy that we were happening parallel to all the pre-grunge stuff. We loved all those bands, but we kind of had a different little world that we were in. And it’s just funny thinking back about how much was going on and just how exciting it was. I guess in the midst of it, partly, you take it for granted, but there was so much fun, great stuff going on. 

Conrad Uno: I don’t know if I recognized it at that moment, but as life went on I could look back and say, ‘God, that’s the way it should be.’ It was that way a few other times in my life. But not very many. 

Split Tooth Media to Scott McCaughey: You joked onstage at the Tractor Tavern in Seattle (on May 24, 2024 at the first 40th anniversary show) that without the Fellows, none of the Seattle craze would have been possible. Where do you feel the Fellows sit in Seattle’s history of music?

Scott McCaughey: We’re sitting in a little rowboat with one broken oar and the caulk is disintegrating. I’ve got my old Yamaha acoustic and the other guys are shivering, banging on bongos. People on a passing yacht watch for a few minutes, then go back to their pork belly and Fireball shots. But they are humming “Bleed Out” as they approach an iceberg.

Jim Sangster: There’s so many debut albums that defined bands, like The Ramones’ first album. I hadn’t really thought of it that way, but that kind of lays it out right there, right? Definitely there’s been swerves and eddies for us, and probably more punk rock influence at different times, but the DNA is there from the get-go. And the songs are still gonna get played at any Young Fresh Fellows show. When a band goes on for a long time, a new record comes out and you want to play those new songs and then things revolve. But these songs, they’re totally part of the Young Fresh Fellows canon. The main canon. It’s kind of remarkable. It defined the band and the songs stand up. 

Chuck Carroll: It set the tone of having fun, not repeating ourselves and the joy of working up the brilliant array of Scott’s songs. Fab Sounds is a quirky record with an element of panic around each bend. We really had good chemistry, and so much of being in a band is good chemistry and all the right pieces. Uno captured that pure energy quite well! 

Scott McCaughey: It’s very unique, to its creators, and compared to all other music makers. But hearing it, I recognize all the music that came before it, manifested itself in that window of time, and came since. These are still pretty much the easiest, most familiar songs that I can play live. That means something! Whenever asked what my favorite Young Fresh Fellows album is, I never think of Fab Sounds. Maybe I should. 

Chuck Carroll: I knew we had something going because Scott was a great songwriter. Not pretentious, always keeping it exciting, innocent, super fun, and not like we’re trying to be rock stars — far from it. We weren’t that young, but we were just having a good time on our own schedule. We had only graduated from college and we were like, well, now what? Are we supposed to get careers and all that? That can wait. (laughs)

Purchase the 4oth anniversary edition of The Fabulous Sounds of the Pacific Northwest from Omnivore
Available June 28th, 2024

This project would not have been possible without a lot of people being very generous with their time and resources. For photos, archival materials, editorial advice, Seattle record store tours, and moral support, we would like to send our gratitude and appreciation to Vincent Albarano, Mike Campbell (and Theo), Ed Huiskamp, Hugh Jones, Alex Marga, Jane and Jason McDonald (check out Ghost Tart Stickers!), Gary Norris, Debra Penk (and Mike), Steve Spencer, and Dave and Sarah Wright.

1. For more on the history of Cellophane Square, read Hugh Jones’ new Substack memoir, The Record Store Years.
2. Chuck Carroll: On the “Power Mowers Theme” when you hear the actual mower starting up, that’s one of Conrad’s lawn mowers. He was like, ‘Wow, “The Power Mowers Theme,” we gotta have a lawn mower in it!’ So we put a microphone up to it and, first try, it started. So that was good.
3.  McCaughey adds: Lulu killed on “A Whisper To A Scream!”
4. The first song McCaughey ever wrote, with Dennis Berry, was called “The Ballad Of Captain Stan.”