Victoria, BC college rock outfit 64 Funnycars return November 12 with Hogwild, the second archival release in their ongoing 604 Records Decades series. Originally released as a four-song 7-inch EP in 1990, the newly remastered Hogwild expands the record to six tracks, pairing the original EP with previously unreleased session outtakes “Crush” and “My First Date.” Recorded with Conrad Uno at Seattle’s Egg Studios, it catches the band stretching their melodic punk and jangly college-rock roots into surf, country, rockabilly and 60s R&B, somewhere in the orbit of the Young Fresh Fellows, the Replacements, the Posies and Buzzcocks.
More importantly, Hogwild captures the last studio recordings by the original lineup of Tim Chan, Eric Cottrell, Eric Lowe and Colin Macrae. By January 1990, Cottrell had already announced he was moving to Japan, so the four booked another session with Uno to get their newest songs down before he left. Everything on Hogwild had been written since the previous year’s Happy Go Lucky, and if that record introduced the Funnycars’ loose, hook-heavy version of Victoria punk, Hogwild shows how quickly their record collections were beginning to pull them somewhere wider and weirder.
For a Victoria band at the turn of the 1990s, that widening world increasingly ran south across the water to Seattle. The two cities were producing their own mutations of underground guitar music at almost exactly the same moment. Victoria had the harder, stranger punk lineage of Nomeansno and the Dayglo Abortions, while Seattle had the melodic underground of the Young Fresh Fellows and the Posies running alongside the increasingly noisy records Uno was making with bands like Mudhoney. The Funnycars weren’t grunge and they weren’t hardcore. They were fast, melodic, jangly and funny, but they moved through the same Pacific Northwest circuitry of campus radio, small clubs, shared bills and friendships that rarely stopped neatly at the border. Seattle was already more than a musical reference point. The Young Fresh Fellows had been an early influence on 64 Funnycars, and Uno’s work with them was one of the reasons the band first chose Egg Studios for Happy Go Lucky. Returning for Hogwild, they found the studio itself had changed. Uno had upgraded Egg with a Spectrasonics recording console originally custom-built for Stax Records in Memphis, an almost absurdly appropriate piece of equipment for a session that would eventually wander from surf and country into the Funnycars’ own attempt at full-blown 60s R&B.
The connections went beyond the control room. Young Fresh Fellows’ Scott McCaughey sat in on a few songs with the band, while Mike Chang of Seattle’s Like Rain added fiddle after Eric Lowe struck up a conversation with him when Like Rain opened for the Posies. The Funnycars would go on to share shows with both bands. It was less a Canadian band making a pilgrimage to some more important American scene than two nearby underground communities bleeding into one another, with records, musicians and friendships moving back and forth across the water. The original four-song Hogwild EP shows just how much ground they were covering. Opener “Fading Away” wraps bright, jangling guitars around Tim Chan and Sarah Gee Miller’s frustration with the proposed redevelopment of Victoria’s historic St. Ann’s Academy, directly across the street from where they lived. “Highway to Parksville” barrels off in another direction entirely, a two-minute instrumental blast of surf guitar and rockabilly momentum. On “Alone With the Blues,” their obsession with Sweetheart of the Rodeo, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Gram Parsons, Dwight Yoakam and Hank Williams surfaces in a fast country waltz, complete with Chang’s fiddle. Then there’s “AMC Pacer,” a revved-up surf-rock ode to one of the ugliest cars ever granted access to a public road, imagined here with mag wheels, a 409 and enough horsepower to humiliate a Ford Probe at the lights.
The two newly unearthed originals push the edges even further. “Crush” brings the band’s love of the Replacements, Hüsker Dü and Soul Asylum into a tougher piece of melodic guitar pop, while “My First Date” reaches back toward Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Stax and Phil Spector. Written from Eric Lowe’s lyrics about friends unlucky in love, the song gave Chan an excuse to go full 60s R&B melodrama while Uno piled on the reverb and Colin Macrae moved over to piano. They spent ages on it, then naturally decided not to release it.
For all that musical wandering, the sessions remained unmistakably Funnycars. They recorded onto the same multitrack tape used for Happy Go Lucky, squeezing in as much material as they could until there was literally nowhere left to go. By the final recordings the beer was flowing, performances were getting looser, and the tape eventually ran out during their take on “Sugar Shack.” Some of that chaos stayed in the vault. What survived as Hogwild was a briefer, broader and occasionally even sillier version of the band than the one that had entered Egg the year before.
By the time the original EP appeared in May 1990, Cottrell was already in Japan and Robin Platts had joined the band. 64 Funnycars would continue through more lineup changes, recordings and touring, eventually sharing a Victoria stage with the Buzzcocks before calling it a day in 1992. But Hogwild sits at the hinge: six songs from the moment the original four knew change was coming and headed back across the water to capture what they had become before it did.