Songoftheday 6/5/21 - I'm not sick but I'm not well, and I'm so hot 'cause I'm in Hell...
"Flagpole Sitta" - Harvey Danger
from the album Where Have All The Merrymakers Gone? (1997)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: ineligible to chart
Billboard Hot 100 Airplay peak; #38 (one week)
Weeks in the Airplay Top-40: 6
Today's song of the day comes from the band Harvey Danger, who came together in the early 1990's as college classmates in Seattle, Washington. After building a local following and releasing their own tape to sell at shows, the band put out an independently-released album on Arena Rock Records that would go on to be picked up by the Warner Brothers-distributed label Slash. The lead single, "Flagpole Sitta", was written by the band's Sean Nelson, Aaron Huffman, Jeff Lin, and Evan Sult, the record comes on with a wall of sound like Bruce Springsteen doing a Green Day song, and while the lyrics don't mention the title other than "running it up the flagpole", fans and radio grabbed on to the "I'm not sick, but I'm not well" tagline in the chorus, but the stream of consciousness about insanity and young angst was more true and spot on than most of the canned radio-friendly rock ditties of the day...
Since "Flagpole Sitta" wasn't released commercially as a retail single, it wasn't able to place on Billboard magazine's official Hot 100 pop chart. However the track got enough radio love to make the top-40 on the airplay component of the tally in August of 1998. The song was a big hit on rock radio, spending five weeks at #3 on Billboard's Alternative Rock radio chart, while popping in at #33 on the Mainstream Rock list. It even crossed over to the older-skewing Adult Top-40 format at #31. Internationally, the single made the top-40 in Iceland at #14, and was a minor hit in Australia (#50), the UK (#57), and France (#98). The Where Have All The Moneymakers Gone? debut album, originally released in July of 1997, over a year before the success of "Flagpole", peaked at #70 on the Billboard 200 sales chart in America, going on to sell over a half million copies. Despite the success of that hit, though, the followup from the record, "Private Helicopter", stiffed completely.
A year later, Harvey Danger reappeared on the Alternative Rock radio chart with a cover of the English Beat's ska classic "Save It For Later" from the movie 200 Cigarettes, After a long delay involving label shuffles, the band returned in 2000 with their sophomore effort, King James Version. Lead single "Sad Sweetheart Of The Radio" rose to #27 on the Alternative Rock list, but the album again went mostly unnoticed, with band calling it quits soon after that. Nelson, Huffman, and Lin reunited in 2004, and released a trio of EP's along with a third independently-distributed album Little By Little. Since then, they have gone off to other careers, with Nelson a fixture in the Seattle newspaper The Stranger, Lin succeeding in IT, and Huffman passing away in 2016.
(9/10)
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Up tomorrow: Boston blues-rock vets jump on an asteroid and take it all in.
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