365 Days of Song Recommendations: Feb 5

Windmills — Toad the Wet Sprocket

It wasn’t until my third Toad the Wet Sprocket show that I finally realized (Glen Phillips told the origin story) that the band’s bizarre name had originated in a Monty Python sketch called “Rock Notes” (found on the group’s Contractual Obligation Album) in which a news journalist, Eric Idle, delivers a proto-Kurt Loder news report.

“Rex Stardust, lead electric triangle with Toad the Wet Sprocket, has had to have an elbow removed following their recent worldwide tour of Finland. Flamboyant, ambidextrous Rex apparently fell off the back of a motorcycle.”

I’m often slow to admit among mixed company that I love the band Toad the Wet Sprocket. (And not just because they went as far as to name themselves after a Monty Python bit.) If you weren’t there in the 90’s, the band’s name causes befuddlement and maybe a giggle; if you were there in the 90’s, there’s a good chance the name only recalls Billboard Top 20 singles Walk on the Ocean and All I Want from the band’s 1991 fear album.

I never want to hear the response from the latter party.

“They were a nice little band.” (Choose your own off-brand palliative.)

People say they knew exactly when they heard the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, or Elvis Presley. Public opinion has deemed these artists worthy of grand epiphanies. Here I am claiming that category also contains Toad the Wet Sprocket, a quartet most often lumped into 90’s nostalgia bands alongside Tonic, Counting Crows, and the Spin Doctors. [shudders]

My friend Andre and I shared new music. Our entire friendship had been based on a compatible taste in music and our movie watching habits (anything and everything, the more indie the better). Sometime in 1994, I’d arrived at his house to play basketball with the other neighborhood slackers and do-nothings, but he ushered me into his room, tossed on a CD, skipped to track #7, and said, “This is some amazing, mellow shit.” Neither of us ever really prefaced the music we shared with band names or song titles. The music spoke for itself.

The casual, nearly insouciant plucking of a guitar and the pulse of a bass drum swelled, prefacing Glen Phillip’s voice, fragile, ever willing to disintegrate, conjuring lyrics inspired by Don Quixote.

I spend too much time
Raiding windmills
We go side by side
Laughing til it’s right

There’s something that you won’t show
Waiting where the light goes

Take the darkest hour
Break it open
Water to repair
What we have broken

I said this was the first time I’d heard Toad the Wet Sprocket, but that’s not entirely accurate. This will sound familiar, but I’d only heard “All I Want” and “Walk on the Ocean” and had paid no more attention to the band with the nonsensical name.

In this moment, or precisely 3 minutes and 47 seconds from Toad’s greatest album Dulcinea, the summer of 1994 paused. I remember his stack CD stereo system. He sat on the bed. I sat on a chair. This is the brand of vivid memory that some people reserve for first dates and first kisses. Music lovers recognize and catalog these moments. These shards of life shaken loose by music, by uncertain revelations that hang in the air just out of reach.

So — Toad, those rock lighters from Santa Barbara, might just be a nice little band, but that nice little band stirred a few souls that listened beyond the earnest, Nilla wafer singles associated with that nonsense name.

Listen and follow the full (and in-progress!) #365Songs playlist on Spotify today!