Six Fingers of Doom!

Six Finger Satellite were one of my favorite bands of the 90's (in addition to the VSS, the Make Up and the Monorchid). As a young lad, my pappy (a really smart hippy who never stopped liking music after the 60's, an authority figure in my life who got "Punk Rock" and has the records to prove it) raised me on a steady diet of Wire, Gang of Four, Mission of Burma and Big Black. Grunge made sense to me in middle school and by the time I was in high school, the only shows in town were shitty hardcore/heavy metalcore gigs. I knew Six Finger Satellite were on Sub Pop, but I wrote them off as probably sounding like Fastbacks or Soundgarden.

Then Beavis and Butthead came along.

I thought that Mike Judge's B&B animated shorts were cool, but the show kind of went over my head initially. Later, it won me over, as it was a brutal critique of the adolescent junk culture that I loathed as a teenager. Beavis and Butthead were the kids I hated, but so was "Todd" and the idiot jocks they encountered.

I came across one episode where they lampooned Six Finger Satellite's "Palour Games" video. It was as fast as hardcore, but had the same post-punk structures that my daddy taught me. I bought the album ("Severe Exposure") as soon as possible. I knew someone out there wanted to play guitar as badly as my heroes taught me.