Current Mojo Alert Level: Orange
The Young Fresh Fellows — I Got My Mojo Workin’ (And I Thought You’d Like To Know)
(from the CD The Men Who Loved Music, Popllama/Frontier Records 1987)
For years, ” I Got My Mojo Workin’ (And I Thought You’d Like To Know)” was my favorite song title of all time, and I still think it ranks way near the top. However, unlike a lot of songs with great titles, it delivers on all other counts as well, and it’s a perfect example of everything that was great about the Young Fresh Fellows, to this day one of the most underrated bands of their time and place.
Humor is a tricky thing in rock and roll. There are people who automatically think that any band with funny or oddball lyrics are automatically just wacky pranksters in the manner of Weird Al Yankovic. (This is not a knock on Weird Al, easily the best musical parodist since Stan Freberg.) But the Young Fresh Fellows in particular were a solid rock and roll band with punk, British Invasion and country influences and in Scott McCaughey, a bandleader with a kick-ass voice and a knack for composing smart, catchy tunes. However, McCaughey’s tendency towards jokey lyrics blinded many who should have known better, leaving the band marginalized even within the indie scene of the ’80s. In a just world, the Young Fresh Fellows would be part of the same pantheon as the Replacements and pre-sucky Soul Asylum.
1987’s The Men Who Loved Music was one of the first CDs I ever bought, and quite possibly the first to have extra tracks: along with the album proper, the CD also has the Refreshments EP from 1988 and a couple of extra tracks besides. Since it was one of only about a dozen or so CDs I owned, I listened to this album endlessly circa 1990, and I think I still have most of it memorized. Inventive, rocking, and funny, the album also has a surprisingly serious subtext, with a number of songs about death, celebrity and celebrity deaths, as well as a couple of genuinely effective ballads that prefigure McCaughey’s later work with the Minus 5. It’s a classic of the period, well worth searching out.
–Stewart Mason
