Letters to Cleo - Wholesale Meats & Fish

Letters to Cleo are an interesting study in what music in the 90’s were like.  I don’t want to over-simplify it, but you didn’t have to have a ton of chart success to have a major label career or a lasting cultural impression.  Their fans grew up and did things like create TV shows and had their characters wear the band’s t-shirts that continued to give them life, long after the band’s peak.

In 1994, close to breaking up, they released an independent record, Aurora Gory Alice, which got significant airplay in their native New England.  This got them a write up in Billboard, which led to them playing South by Southwest, which led to a deal with Giant Records.  Giant, seemingly haphazardly, threw “Here and Now” onto the soundtrack for Melrose Place and it became their biggest hit, peaking at #10 on the US Alternative Chart, #56 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #40 on the Top 40 Mainstream Chart.  The album peaked at #123 on the Billboard 200 and #3 on the Heatseekers chart. 

Personally, I found “Here and Now” annoying.  At fourteen, I felt like it was “rich, college kids playing at being outsiders” music.  Which, I still find a lot of college rock to be.  They’re not weird, but they’re trying to be weird to be cool.  The problem is, not being weird in the first place means that their version of it is some manufactured version of it that bears no resemblance to reality.  Like a little boy putting on his dad’s suit, they’re not fooling anyone except themselves and kids just like them with less musical ability. 

When Wholesale Meats & Fish came out in 1995 (terrible name for an album by the way), I changed my mind about Letters to Cleo a bit.  I don’t remember if I saw the video for “Awake” on Alternative Nation or 120 Minutes or they played the song on X-103 in Indianapolis, but watching the video now, there’s no way seeing Kay Hanley didn’t play a part in my attraction to the band.  She’s like your friend’s older sister who came home from college for the summer and you pined for her all summer, knowing she’d never give you the time of day and was returning to campus in the fall.  Beautiful, but seemingly approachable to a fifteen-year-old social misfit.

I would say that Go! is my favorite Letters to Cleo record, also their best, but this album has some great pop rock songs on it and they were a very good live band (I saw them on the mainstage of X-Fest at Deer Creek Music Center in August of 1995 and in 2002 saw Kay Hanley open for Stereophonics at the House of Blues Sunset Strip).  “Awake” and “Pizza Cutter” are bangers, great, catchy alternative rock like what was all over the radio in 1995.  “St. Peter” is also a good song and Kay’s vocal performance is one of her more emotive tracks. 

Although not one of my favorite records from the 90’s, it definitely elicits more nostalgia than a lot of other records.  I can’t help but think of hanging out in my friend Megan’s bedroom and smoking cigarettes.  Her dad, or step-mom, Jennifer, popping their heads in on us and asking Megan to do some chore or something.  We’d go over to Bloomington, where Indiana University is, to see some punk band and there’d be an opening band that were students, doing their own version of 80’s and early 90’s college rock.  The female lead singer with pig-tails and Mary Janes and knee socks crooning about the boy she likes over top of some nerds playing Stratocasters.  The 90’s were a great time to be a teenager, but my generation made our artistic mistakes too. 

Those few songs still sound as good today as they did 28 years ago.  Go give them a listen and then go listen to Go!  I’d put money on you nodding along or tapping your foot.