Posted by As far as I can tell, it was the coming together of three unlikely factors that explain the almost inexplicable (if brief) rise of Moxy Früvous:
1) They were following the success of the similarly quirky but vastly more talented Barenaked Ladies like a car following an ambulance through rush hour traffic.
2) They were an unnatural but inevitable extension of the boyband phenomenon, providing a harmony-rich inoffensive swoon for the aging teeny-bopper set, and
3) They were pre-fulfilling the prophecy post-cast by The Simpson’s in their iconic B Sharps episode from 1993. (Homer: “Rock and roll had become stagnant, ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ was seven years away. Something had to fill the void, and that something was barbershop.”)
In detail:
The Barenaked Ladies had recently completely rewritten the rules for Canadian independent music. Their home-made Hamburger Tape sold 100,000 copies, in a time when an indie band was lucky to sell half of a run of 1,000 cassettes. Sam The Record Man suddenly had an indie section at every checkout counter across the country and they were looking for similar, funny-but-also-musically-solid tapes to add to these racks and it wouldn’t hurt if it was CanCon either. Moxy Früvous fit the bill perfectly.
As it has always been, while the best, most enduring music of the era was steeping on the backburner, the biggest selling records of the late ’80’s were syrupy pop songs, most of them recorded by slick boyband vocal groups that sold their souls for a handful of hip(notic) dance moves guaranteed to sell a lot of units to a lot of starry-eyed teenagers. When these kids grow up they inevitably move on, but many of them don’t move very far. Again, enter Moxy Früvous.
And finally, the track record of The Simpsons-as-Nostradamus is universally considered beyond reproach and their cynical ability to foresee trends (even in retrospect) cannot be dismissed.
I guess it will come as no surprise to learn that the only time I saw the Moxy’s was their Frosh Week show at my university residence. Not only did I live a mere two hundred metres from the venue, but I was head of the stage crew and tasked (as well as paid) to be at their show in the Fenn Lounge on September 7th, 1992.
What might come as a bit of a surprise is that I shelled out some of my highly-budgeted funds for both a CD and a t-shirt after the show, so taken was I with the band. I guess it was my huge respect for BNL that got my aesthetics through their door, but I gotta say I howled at The Früv’s take on Green Eggs And Ham (a Seuss fan, I am) and I thought a couple of their songs were actually quite heavy, like their sing-song-y tune about post-apocalyptic nuclear holocaust.
I still wear the t-shirt, ugly that it is, but I’ve had no interest in listening to the CD in decades. I’m sure most people that bought their CD (or cassette) back in the day feels the same. Come to think of it, if not for founding member Gian Gomeshi’s notorious rise and fall, Moxy Früvous would be the very definition of a flash in the pan, a mere footnote on a forgotten page of a music scene that few people in the world even knew of, much less cared about.
Now, thanks to Gomeshi and his nasty shenanigans, Moxy Früvous is forever upgraded all the way up to asterisk status.
Todd Man Out 