Dare to Be Surprised

It’s easy to forget just how deeply weird the ’90s were. On a global scale, you had the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact satellites (Sputnik’s Down!). Hundreds of millions of people were thrown to the wolves of economic chaos and misery, and the Cold War that had provided the defining framework for understanding the world over the previous half century suddenly evaporated. Hapless theorists were left to speculate about “the end of history,” even. Confusing! At the local level it was a time when one could sit down with one’s father as he watched NASCAR on TV and hear “Natural One” by my underground music friends the Folk Implosion — their song inescapably employed as bumper music before the next commercial break. Also confusing! One gets the sense it was a little confusing for The Folk Implosion’s John Davis and Lou Barlow, too. They were in the middle of recording Dare to Be Surprised, the follow-up to their 1994 debut album, Take A Look Inside, when it happened. The KIDS stuff — the handful of songs and instrumental tracks they’d contributed to the soundtrack of the now infamous Harmony Korine/Larry Clark film — had been something of a lark, but it was while recording it at Boston’s venerable Fort Apache that they met Wally Gagel. A happy accident: Gagel happened to be the house engineer on duty the day they showed up, but they found in him someone whose general sensibilities, and, critically, enthusiasm for new wave, matched their own.