Best Be Warned

It’s just dawned on me that I’ve not written about Jellyfish yet, which just seems wrong. In a weird way, Jellyfish were the first band that felt like they were “mine,” in part because their particular Beach Boys/ELO/Cheap Trick/Beatles brand of Power Pop wasn’t what the cool kids – or, to be honest, much of anyone else – happened to be listening to back in the early ’90s, when they were around. But nonetheless, they were a band that I found, somehow, and immediately fell for; there was something in the sweetness and secret sour of their songs, their harmonies and unashamed pop-ness, that I couldn’t resist. Looking back, I did it backwards; I loved Jellyfish before I really got into the Beatles, years before I knew that Brian Wilson did anything more than “Barbara-Ann.”

But as much as I loved their music – and still do, even if I look at these videos and think “Those were interesting outfit choices, gentlemen” – I almost loved the fact that no-one else that I knew knew about them even more. At a time when my friends were listening to Guns ‘n’ Roses and wanting to grow up to wear tight jeans and sneer a lot, there I was, enjoying a late take on the California sound, feeling like I’d found some wonderful, meaningful secret. It’s that whole “hating it when the band you love becomes popular” thing, except that this band never managed to really become popular.

I’m sure that it was my Jellyfish love that made me embrace Britpop as much as I did, only a couple of years later; I’ve always felt that there was a kindred spirit between Andy Sturmer and Roger Manning – Jellyfish’s core duo, even when the rest of the band became a parade of changing faces – and the 60s retroists that recycled the Small Faces and the Beatles into a cottage industry, and secretly wished that there would come some critical re-appraisal of the band that’d elevate them to a public position like the one they have in my heart. Instead, Manning went on to play with Beck for years, and then become a cult star, a session musician for musos to look for, and Sturmer settled into writing gigs that managed to produce at least two tunes well known to comic geeks:


Hey. It’s a living. And they’re good songs, dammit. I just wish that there were more things like this in the world: