The Woodentops were one of those odd bands for me. You know how there was that one girl/guy in college who you fell passionately in bed with for about three weeks? Then one day it was over and not only were you not heartbroken about it, but to the extent that you ever thought of that person again, it was with a certain bemused wonder, like "Huh. That was fun. Well, moving on." Yeah, well, the Woodentops were kinda my musical equivalent to that girl. I was a senior in high school when their debut album, Giant, came out to a brief but fervent wash of ecstatic press, and I snapped it right up. For a few weeks there, possibly even a couple of months, Giant hit all the same pleasure centers for me that my big obsessions of the time, Prefab Sprout, Everything But the Girl and Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, did, but in a kind of quirky way that I found really appealing. In particular, I really loved the way the acoustic rhythm guitar was playing about twice as fast as the rest of the band. (However, you must remember that I was a high school senior in Lubbock Texas in 1987, and therefore I had not yet heard the Wedding Present. When I did, about a year later in college, my first reaction was something along the lines of "Ah. So that's where the Woodentops got that.") But certainly by the time I graduated, Giant was no longer on or even near the top of my next-to-the-stereo pile; I had noticed that I never really bothered to play side two at all, and on side one, the only song that didn't tend to drone on too long was "Good Thing," which is the song I still remember when I think back fondly on the Woodentops, the same way that almost all of my passing thoughts about Wendy Chavez involve her breasts.

Right, the song. Back when CDs were still wicked expensive, magazines used to give freebie flexi-discs with their newsstand issues, and occasionally, an actual 7" vinyl single like this one, which includes a stonking version of the Shangri-Las' "Train From Kansas City" by my beloved Shop Assistants and a couple of minor tunes by the Icicle Works and the Mighty Lemon Drops along with this live-in-LA rendition of the Woodentops' "Love Train" (not the O'Jays song), which ups the energy level hugely and sounds much more exciting in retrospect than the comparatively tame and slick studio version.

-Stewart Mason