Back in the mid-`80s, I had a significantly more voracious appetite for new music, and while that sounds like it might have been expensive and complicated, it was reasonably simple to track down the new stuff you liked without having to spend a king’s ransom, if you knew where to go.
I vividly remember, in the summer of 1986, hearing a single by a Minneapolis band, The Suburbs, called “#9.” That previous spring, I recalled my friend Walter at Denison University, repeatedly spinning that band’s 1984 EP, Dream Hog with some regularity, and quite digging it. This single, “#9,” sounded like quite a departure, given that it was on their comparatively slick, major-label debut (they’d signed to A&M Records, released one epoynmous LP, and were pretty much immediately dropped). I picked up a promo copy of The Suburbs for a couple of dollars at St. Marks Sounds, and slapped “#9” on many an outgoing mixtape, often nestled incongruously between Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” and “Away” by The Bolshoi.
As it happened, given the lacklustre performance of The Suburbs’ big label debut, the album was never released on compact disc and the band broke up.
In later years, somewhat predictably, The Suburbs reformed, toured, released new shit and re-released a lot of old shit, but their star-crossed LP, The Suburbs, was never re-visited. While my enthusiasm for the band has since long waned, I’d been harboring a hankering, over recent months, to experience “#9” again, having not heard it in literal decades.
Thing is, it’s not on Spotify. It’s not on Bandcamp and my copy of the LP lives in a flight case in the basement of my mother’s worryingly flood-friendly basement out on Long Island. Even here in the age of immediate technological gratification, I couldn’t manage to hear “#9” again.
I seemed to remember there being a proper music video for “#9,” but I could never find that, either.
Until today.
Someone posted the original video as recently as a year ago, and I only came across it this afternoon. Find that below.
What I’d remembered of “#9” was strikingly different from what I heard when I hit play. Through the prism of 2024, not only is the single very much “of its era” (in, frankly, not necessarily a good way), but it’s just kinda … dumb. I mean, I love a lot of dumb rock, but usually there’s something slightly clever or notable about it. In this instance, “#9” is just banal in its dumbness, and sounds like a bit of LP filler on the soundtrack to a sub-John Hughes coming-of-age flick.
Musically, beyond being rife with period-specific flourish, I learned that the LP which spawned “#9” was produced by former Prince drummer and fellow Minnesotan, Bobby Z. I guess that was designed to add some purple pomp and circumstance to the band’s otherwise strictly “New Wave” sound. And while lead singer Beej Chaney might dress, punkily preen and pout like Stiv Bator of the Dead Boys, this is pretty middle-of-the-road stuff, and I now regret disseminating it on so many mixtapes.
No wonder they got dropped.
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