Is it our most-reprinted Pencil Storm blog EVER? Maybe so. Is it because it’s a GREAT one? Definitely.
The two-night record release party for Watershed’s new album - Blow It Up Before It Breaks - will take place tonight, Friday June 14th and tomorrow night, Saturday, June 15th, at the Rumba Cafe (2507 Summit Street / 614-268-1841. Distinct sets will be performed each night. Details at Rumba Cafe.
35 for 35: My Favorite Watershed Songs - by David Martin
(reprinted from 2020)
Listen while you read. Click here for Watershed 35 for 35 Spotify playlist.
Watershed is one of my favorite bands. But I can’t pretend to be objective. I have known Colin Gawel (guitar, vocals) since elementary school; our house was on his paper route. When he formed a band, at age 15, with Joe Oestreich (bass, vocals) and Herb Schupp (drums), I attended (and sometimes helped lug gear to) their earliest performances, including the lunchtime shows in the back of a Subway at Graceland Shopping Center.
After I finished college, I shared an apartment with Colin, Joe and manager/non-performing member Mike “Biggie” McDermott. This was an exciting time. I started writing for an alternative newspaper in Columbus, while the band achieved major milestones (first headlining gig at the Newport, signing a deal with Epic Records). We’ve remained friends, though it’s obviously no longer the kind of friendship you have when you are pooling rent money in your early 20’s.
Watershed continues to write, record and perform when the founding members’ schedules allow. A few months ago, the band released an EP, Extended Player. The vinyl edition includes a poster designed from photographs and memorabilia from the band’s 35-year history. To mark the occasion, I came up with a list of my favorite 35 Watershed songs. I say favorite (not best) in recognition of the subjectivity of the exercise. My ranking formula gave more weight to concepts and lyrics, so your mileage may vary. Also, some songs I just wanted to write about more than others =).
35. Manifesto (What I Like to Do), Brick & Mortar
This is Colin giving notice that he will periodically disappear into the basement with a six-pack and his Thin Lizzy records. It’s surely the only song in the universe that mentions or alludes to the Ramones, Styx, the Grateful Dead and Steven Van Zandt’s radio show all in the same tune. Joe Peppercorn’s keyboards give the song a sense of whimsy that seems appropriate.
34. A Long Runway, Extended Player
A song about forbearance. The sly lyrics (“I can give you everything I got/Except money or my time”) bring to mind Dan Baird and Terry Anderson, two songwriters (and occasional collaborators) that Colin admires. Anchored by an acoustic guitar, the song benefits from the studio gloss applied by Tim Patalan, who produced the band’s best two albums, The More It Hurts, the More It Works and The Fifth of July.
33. American Muscle, Brick & Mortar
A Randy Newman-style satire of the U.S financial sector, the song features references to the queen of Jordan and several world currencies (yen, pound, dinar, rupee). I’m not sure what my reaction would be if, having never been exposed to Watershed, I heard the song on the radio driving through Columbus. (Not positive, maybe?) But as a fan, I appreciate the band stretching its legs.
32. I’d Be a Liar, Star Vehicle
Is this Watershed’s grungiest song? It doesn’t sound like a Nirvana song, exactly, but I can imagine Nirvana performing it. (Colin and Kurt Cobain have similar vocal ranges, no?) As others have noted, the passage “No, I wouldn’t cheat my friends in playing cards/But, honey, cheating on you, well, that ain’t as hard” is delicious.
31. Little Mistakes, Brick & Mortar
Man, has it really been eight years since Brick & Mortar was released? It does not seem that long ago. I suppose it’s because my life today is not all that different from what it was in 2012: same spouse, same house. The record’s first track, “Little Mistakes” is a punchy number about the score-keeping that can take place when two people have been together a while. The narrator feels he’s being judged too harshly. “Takes a calculator to register all her complaints,” Joe sings. The fills played by drummer Dave Masica, who had stepped in for Herb in 1998, all register as excellent.
30. Half of Me, Star Vehicle
Colin is the podunkier of the two, but Joe is the principal writer of “Half of Me,” which sounds like the Georgia Satellites ripping through a George Jones song. Whoever in Nashville is responsible for identifying little-heard rock songs for established artists to record missed out on this one.
29. I’ve Been Looking Everywhere, The More It Hurts, the More It Works
The track reminds me of “Join Together,” a favorite Who song (which is occasionally inserted/quoted into the sing-along section at the end during live performances) . It brims with confidence, needing only five lines of lyrics to get its point across. The guitar work in the middle of the song is snazzy. Colin is a good guitar player who doesn’t care if people think he’s a good guitar player.
28. Waiting for the Greatest, Brick & Mortar
This is a repurposing of a fine song by the Columbus band Twin Cam. Joe wrote new verses, and the band made other adjustments. I love the arrangement but have mixed feelings about the story of frustrated adolescence Joe came up with. The song captures the impatience of youth (“It seems so near, dammit, when will it get here/’Cause every day just drags and drags”). But the material about the helicoptering parents with yoga mats is jarring, maybe because that was not the experience of anyone over 40 I know. (The comedian John Mulaney has a bit about growing up “before children were special.”) It’s like Dylan singing about cutting school to see Aerosmith.
27. Superstressed, Star Vehicle
Full of twitchy energy, “Superstressed” sounds like Cheap Trick setting out to write and record a song like “Blister in the Sun.” Speaking of the Violent Femmes, I remember Colin once describing their song “American Music” as the “best song nobody’s heard more than once,” which somehow made sense.
26. Decorated Scars, Extended Player
A song about maturity that shows the band can still craft crisp pop-rock songs. The glorious bridge sets this one apart. “The good part of getting older/You don’t have to care about what’s cool,” Joe sings, returning to subject matter (scenes, hipness, artifice) he’s explored in other songs. Also: Herb’s back!
25. You Need Me, Twister
Mid-’90s Watershed in a box. It does the quiet-loud thing. It features both singers (Joe takes the bridge). Herb’s power is evident. Dramatic pause at the three-quarter mark. The pronoun-verb-pronoun title. A scream. When I conjure this era of Watershed in my mind, this is the song the band is playing.
24. The Best Is Yet to Come, The Fifth of July
Closing out The Fifth of July, “The Best Is Yet to Come” is a preview of sorts, signaling the more dad-rock (not a pejorative!) direction to come in Colin’s outside work and on Brick & Mortar. To my ear, the version on the live album Three Chords and a Cloud of Dust II captures the bloodied-but-unbowed spirit of the song better than the studio creation, which feels a little tame.
23. Twister, Twister
Me, listening to the song for the first time in years, at the 4:25 mark: Why no tornado sirens? Seems like a missed opportunity. Me at 4:50: Ah, never mind. One of the things that’s unique about Colin is he’s an optimist with a disaster infatuation; this song is an expression of his “storm’s coming” side. Herb’s drums and Joe’s bass sound like death on the march.
22. Slowly Then Suddenly, The Fifth of July
A character in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” he responds. “gradually and then suddenly.” Relationships can fall apart in the same manner, as this slapper attests. Dave rides a Bo Diddley groove before things get all Green Day in the chorus.
21. New Depression, The Fifth of July
The verses have the twang you hear in some Colin songs before reaching a bright, attention-grabbing chorus with tight Joe harmonies. And that bridge! Joe starts singing it in the chorus, as if it’s a piece of great gossip he can’t wait to share.
20. Over Too Soon, The More It Hurts, the More It Works
When Paul Westerberg put out his first solo record, he was asked if he worried people would think the album, which had a number of ballads, was too wimpy. “Quiet music is not wimpy,” he replied. “Wimpy is trying to be too cute.” This one checks the quiet-but-not-cute box. “I’ve been losing you since the day we met/I think I’m finally getting the hang of it,” is one of Joe’s best lyrics.
19. Sad Drive, Twister
Watershed completists may recall the band cut Bruce Springsteen’s “Atlantic City” as a B-side to a “Twister” single released in 1993. Springsteen’s influence can be heard in this driving song from the same era. Bar shows trained my brain to expect the band to come in at full volume at a certain point, but the studio version of “Sad Drive” stays in the same ruminative groove. It was the right choice.
18. Getting Ready, The Fifth of July
The verses to this song just kind of plug along. The chorus, however, makes me want to jump on a table and pump my fists in the air. I love the way Colin yowls at the beginning of the lines “I’m getting ready/I’m getting sick of it all.” He sounds like he means it.
17. Black Concert T-Shirt, Star Vehicle & The More It Hurts, the More It Works
I don’t think it means to, but the song takes me back to our days at Worthingway Middle School, where a black concert T-shirt — specifically, the jersey-style concert T-shirt — was the unofficial school uniform for boys. We were in junior high from 1981 to 1983, which was still the ’70s in Ohio.
16. My Lucky Day, The Fifth of July
Initially unsure if Dave was a good fit, Joe came to find his drumming style (“swingy-quick,” as Joe describes it in his book Hitless Wonder) perfectly suited his songs. Dave’s gallop powers “Lucky Day,” a song about contentment that spins like a top on a smooth surface. The countless hours Colin spent listening to Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen comes through in the guitar solo.
15. Star Vehicle, Star Vehicle
The band channeled its frustration with getting dropped by Epic into this one. “Star Vehicle” is a crunching, angry song taking aim at the music industry’s tendency to overvalue street cred. “You cut the disc on a boombox, baby/Spent the rest on thrift-shop clothes,” Colin sings, flecks of acid forming in the corners of his mouth. Pair it with Local H’s “Rock and Rock Professionals” and watch the vinegar drip from the walls.
14. How Do You Feel, The Carpet Cliff & Twister
I went to Wikipedia and looked up the debut (or near debut) pop/rock albums that were released at around the same time as Twister. Here is a partial list:
Hootie & the Blowfish, Cracked Rear View
Oasis, Definitely Maybe
Veruca Salt, American Thighs
Soul Coughing, Ruby Vroom
Dave Matthews Band, Under the Table and Dreaming
Bush, Sixteen Stone
Blink-182, Cheshire Cat
Silverchair, Frogstomp
Sugar Ray, Lemonade and Brownies
Supergrass, I Should Coco
Hanson, Boomerang
All in all, I’d say the landscape was pretty fertile for “How Do You Feel” to become or small- or medium-sized hit with a little TLC from the record company. Alas, Epic gave up on it.
13. Bleeding on the Blank Page, Extended Player
Joe described this song better than I can, telling Columbus Alive: “It’s Watershed trying to write a Smithereens song that sounds like an AC/DC song.” Not long before Watershed went on tour with the Smithereens in 1995, Colin and I saw the band perform at the car show at the Columbus Convention Center. It had to be a little demoralizing for the Smithereens to perform under the fluorescent lights of a convention hall, amid waxed Chryslers and Saturns, but they were pros and put on a good show.
12. Broken, Brick & Mortar
Colin sounds both defiant and regretful as he looks at the choices he’s made in “Broken,” a song that seems to acknowledge that being in a rock band wears differently on a man at age 40 than it did at 25. This passage gets me every time:
“Can’t change the things I’ve done
Wouldn’t if I could anyway
All my biggest mistakes are my proudest days
Well I haven’t hit the bottom
But I see it pretty clear
It moves a little closer
Inch by Inch
Year by year”
Joe sings along with Colin throughout most of the song, as if to say, “I’m here for you, buddy.”
11. Wallflower Child, The Carpet Cliff & The More It Hurts, the More It Works
There’s a clever section in Hitless Wonder where Joe takes the time to describe how a song gets written. He recalls a day at work when a catchy melody popped in his head. At first he wondered if he was humming an oldie. No, he decided, this was new. Later he came up with a chord progression and a chorus, the “words and melody lining up together like tumblers of a safe I’d unlocked.” He took the song, “Wallflower Child,” into the practice room where the band worked it into something “straightforward and simple, melodic and fast.” There was more where that came from.
10. If That’s How You Want It, Twister & Star Vehicle
9. Laundromat, The Fifth of July
A critic who reviewed Twister detected the influence of the Replacements. “‘If That’s How You Want It,’” he wrote, “might as well be a Paul Westerberg solo single.” The na na nas recall “Dyslexic Heart,” I suppose. But is it the most Replacements-like song in the Watershed canon? I might choose “Wreck It,” which sounds like something the ’Mats might have recorded in the Twin/Tone years, or “Laundromat,” a rocker that echoes “Left of the Dial” and “Little Mascara.” For sure, Westerberg would appreciate a song about killing time in a laundromat. He might even be jealous of “I’m trying to get some change/For the dryer and the Pac-Man game/One-hundred grand high score/Triple-A the name.”
8. Anniversary, The More It Hurts, the More It Works
I think of this song as a sort of sequel to “How Do You Feel.” Both are slightly indulgent crowd-pleasers that wear their hearts on the sleeve. “Anniversary” showed the progress the band had made since Twister. The lyrics are sharper; the big moments pack more of a wallop. The hair on my neck still stands up when Joe starts singing the counter-melody toward the end of the song (“whaaaaat’s best”).
7. Mercurochrome, The More It Hurts, The More It Works
Listening to the all the songs in a short amount of time you pick up on quirks. One of Joe’s is that he likes old-timey medicinals. He slipped a reference to ipecac in “She Picks the Songs,” from Star Vehicle, before building a dark song around Mercurochrome, an antiseptic generically known as merbromin. You can’t buy it anymore. Merbromin and other drugs containing mercury came up for FDA review in the late ’70s and were eventually taken off the shelves.
6. The Habit, The Fifth of July
Colin works through his mildly self-destructive tendencies in a lot of his songs. “I gotta stop drinking beer to fall asleep and taking coffee and pills to wake up,” goes the opening line in “The Habit.” “I gotta stop hitting on your friends and hoping you ain’t lookin.’” The itemization of sins is loud and fast, with Dave’s snare cracking like a rider’s crop. The line “Paranoia will destroy you” is a nod to Ray Davies, one of Colin’s songwriting heroes.
5. The Fifth of July, The Fifth of July
“You’re going off to school,” Joe sings in the second verse of this song, which is kind of like Van Halen’s “Summer Nights” with 20 additional IQ points. “I kinda sorta thought of going back, too/It’s somewhere on a list of things I’ll never do.” Oh, he went back to school all right. Joe finished his degree so hard he’s now an endowed chair of an English department with four books to his name. His portrait should hang in the creative-writing room at Ohio State. Give the MFA students something to aspire to.
4. New Life, The More It Hurts, the More It Works
One of the things Patalan figured out about Watershed is that Joe is adept at singing fast. To that end, he encouraged the band to pack more words in the verses of various songs. “New Life” may be the most syllable-dense to emerge from the Patalatashed era; at one point Joe spits 36 words in eight seconds. Not easy! Some Watershed songs sound like songs Joe and Colin could have released on solo records. Not this one, which sounds like it contains genetic material from both.
3. Suckerpunch, The More It Hurts, the More It Works
When the band started to perform “Suckerpunch” at shows, I told Colin I liked it. He gave me a blank look and mumbled a noncommittal response. The song, I did not know at the time, had created a rift, after Joe and Patalan recorded a version with other musicians. When Colin found out, he was not happy. (I’m not spilling secrets; Joe tells the story in Hitless Wonder.) The band, of course, survived the drama. Colin sings the bridge in the live version, so I suppose he’s made peace with it. Good thing, too, because the song rocks.
2. Obvious, The Fifth of July
For a long time I thought Joe was singing “Obvious, we roll” in the chorus to “Obvious,” not “Obviously wrong.” Crucial difference! The word “wrong” is key to understanding this song about a hookup that takes place against the participants’ better judgment. The tactile language (dirty clothes, refrigerator magnet poetry, Magic 8-ball) puts the listener right in the room with the couple; you can almost hear the click of the light on the nightstand.
1. Can’t Be Myself, The More It Hurts, the More It Works
The short answer: The Columbus Dispatch called this song a “shot of rock ‘n’ roll ephedrine”; The Other Paper called it a “monster hit of the summer.” Don’t overthink it.
A longer answer: Released in 2002, The More It Hurts, the More It Works is a small miracle, which is why the single from it tops my list. Think about what Watershed survived for the record to happen: Getting dropped from a major label. Releasing an indie-label follow-up that went nowhere. The drummer quitting. Fighting for crumbs as a support act for Insane Clown Posse. Turning 30. Amid the band turmoil and life changes, the Colin-Joe partnership not only stayed intact; it found something approaching greatness at Patalan’s barnhouse studio in Michigan. In my mind, the two-album run of The More It Hurts and The Fifth of July (2005) stands up with any Columbus act’s peak. But, as I mentioned, I can’t be objective.
David Martin is an investigator in Kansas City, Missouri.