Here comes an admission that I’m sure will allow the surviving members of Crowded House to sleep soundly: I was wrong in declaring a few weeks back, with my God-given cynicism, that a two-thirds reunion of Crowded House was pointless. I’m not sure that I’ll give up my belief that trios cannot be considered reunited lacking one key member, but I will keep the lessons I’m learning in mind while I watch Crowded House’s farewell concert in Sydney, Australia on this new (to me) VH1 Classic channel.
The year my wife and I lived in Budapest, Hungary, we fell in love with Crowded House’s Together Alone album. Mad props to Townsman A-Dogg, who sent us a cassette of the band’s then-new release! It was a free-flowing, perfectly constructed pop album with stoner undercurrent that did everything the most fluid of XTC songs did without the Prock impulses and pitfalls. That year was the first year I felt a profoundly new level of happiness and satisfaction in my life, and that album played right into those good vibes.
Prior to receiving that cassette, we’d liked a handful of songs from the first 3 albums, but too often they sounded like Squeeze watered down by the reverbs and 128-string guitars of producer Mitchell Froom (who did that first big album – I don’t care to be corrected as to whether he did the second one or not). Along with getting into Together Alone, we had the opportunity to experience the band’s music and great humor through their frequent appearances on the European broadcast of MTV’s Most Wanted, hosted by the delightful Ray Cokes, who was my British precursor to my eventual, imaginary, late-night good friend, Conan O’Brien.
The highpoint of their Most Wanted appearances was a marathon session with Cokes in which, among other things, the band sat up in an ornate bed in silk robes and composed a song based around random lyrics faxed in by viewers. Each member was effortlessly funny. It was like watching The Monkees come to life. I wish someone had taped this thing from 1994 and put it on YouTube for me to show you.
At this point, I need to get back to where I was initially headed. What I realized tonight, in watching this perfectly constructed band at the end of their career, playing to their home crowd, was that I’m all for the reunited two thirds of Crowded House. I hope the surviving members and their families have a blast. I hope Paul Hester‘s estate rakes in a billion dollars and shares in the joy. I hope they come near me and my entire family gets to see them.
