Theolonious Monster’s “Sammy Hagar Weekend”: Perfectly Capturing A Certain Place In Time
Sammy Hagar lives in my local community. He is treated heroically in the local press. He’s an entrepreneur, a performer and a philanthropist extraordinaire. He’s supposedly an overall great guy.
That’s pretty odd. To me, Sammy was always associated with particularly bad singing, even worse taste and a very conservative kind of psuedo-rebellion. You probably knew that late-70s/early-80s scene pretty well: guys walking around in long-sleeve concert t-shirts and girls with feathered roach clips in their hair. Cool, dude.
Theolonious Monster was (and still is) an LA-based band that did a kind of Replacements thing in the 80s. They mixed jangly guitars, punk rock, folk rock with drunken sloppiness, punctuating it all with humor.
A “two-fer” CD collection of their second and third albums (Stormy Weather and Next Saturday Afternoon) is consistently great. “Michael Jordan” is a slacker anthem about sitting home all day doing nothing other than watching reruns of The Odd Couple, and then tuning into to watch Michael Jordan score 47 points. “Lena Horne Still Sings Stormy Weather” is about holding onto all of of the good things in life during times of change.
We got a Metallica t-shirt/We got a little tiny baby mustache/We got a jacked up Camaro/We’re sitting in the parking lot at Anaheim Stadium/Drinking beer, smoking pot, snorting coke/And then drive, drive over 55/Yeah/Cause it’s a Sammy Hagar weekend/It’s a big man’s day
Pop That Goes Crunch! 