Joy has come to this house in the form of the CD issue of the Couch Flambeau compilation I Did a Power Slide in the Taco Stand. Anyone who went to college in the eighties probably remembers these guys, with their killer combination of hard rock guitar and absurd, sometimes gleefully stupid lyrics delivered in Jay Tiller's bemused, nasal squawk. Of course, one could quibble with the song selection: a lot of my favorite tracks from the earliest years (when they were still known as the Couch Potatoes, until the organization of that name got snitty) are missing, probably because the original master tapes were lost and the songs that do appear here had to be remastered. The band's Models EP seems to have mysteriously disappeared from the discography as represented on its website - no huge loss, except for the immortal "Satan's Buddies" - but that's why I still own a turntable. And sadly, the band's balance between "I'm a really good guitar player" and "I'm a huge geek" tipped a bit too much toward the guitar end in later years: too many of the songs from the band's more recent releases are longer than they need to be and slightly curdled in wit. But it's great to have this stuff in the rather-less-transient-than-cassette CD medium in any event. Since the all-inclusive box set with extra disc of bonus tracks is probably not feasible for a band that was a cult phenomenon at best (a phrase which here means "never threatening Michael Jackson's reign over the eighties charts"), I'm happy to have what this set offers.
Oh - and the band continues its habit of incorporating Beatle-geek lore in its release's catalog numbers: previous titles have cribbed from the original, US Capitol Records releases, while this one is catalog number LMW28IF...
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