You would think that the town that produced Buddy Holly would maintain at least a small power pop scene, but my semi-hometown of Lubbock, Texas (actually, I was born in Denver City, about a hundred miles away, a town that makes Jon's hometown of Pratt, KS look like Paris) has never had a particularly active local music presence despite being home to the rather huge campus of Texas Tech University. When I was attending high school in Lubbock, the Nelsons were pretty much IT when it came to decent local bands, but as far as the kids at Monterey High were concerned, they were full-on rock stars. Pretty much the only new wave-influenced band in Lubbock through the first half of the '80s, the Nelsons took a lot of cues from the likes of the Rezillos and the B-52's, producing a jumpy, herky-jerky take on new wave bubblegum that favored scratchy-scratchy guitars, a cheap organ and a goofy comic outlook. (Singer Donnie Allison's closing spoken-word rant is saved from total dorkiness only by the gleeful abandon with which he delivers it.) It worked, for a while, and the Nelsons actually flirted with mainstream success, winning one round of MTV's Basement Tapes contest (remember that? It was like a battle of the bands where a lot of local bands sent in really crappy homemade videos in and we all sat around and laughed at how awful they were) with a deeply silly video for this very song. But then Ricky Nelson died and the Nelsons changed their name out of respect when they found out that his twin sons Gunnar and Matthew were using it in L.A. Only problem was, they changed their name to Unexplained Cattle Mutilations. Yeah, pretty much nobody ever heard from them again.

-Stewart Mason