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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Turned on by ‘Turn the Radio Off’

Reel Big Fish CD creates lasting love of music

I ripped the cellophane from the CD on New Year’s Eve 2000, grinning at the big “Parental Advisory” sticker on the front and chuckling to myself at the picture of the deranged woman holding a gun to the head of a radio DJ. My parents had finally bought me Reel Big Fish’s first major release, “Turn the Radio Off,” three years after the band had its brief flirtation with fame and just as I was beginning to understand the pull of live music.

Within a year, I would see the ska-punk outfit from Orange County at the Uptown Theater in Kansas City, the first of what has become seven trips to see the band live. I’d been hooked by “Sell Out” and “She Has a Girlfriend Now,” both indicative of the tongue-in-cheek lyrics that Aaron Barret and Co. have become known for, in four-minute spurts on the local college radio station. Now I held the album in my grubby, 13-year-old hands, and I told myself I was ready.

I listened to that CD four times that night before I went to bed, woke up, threw the disc back in my skip-protection disc player, then listened a few more times. Before I went back to school, I knew all the lyrics by heart, and developed my own interpretative skanking dance to the largely instrumental “241.”

“Turn the Radio Off” wasn’t the first album I owned, and it certainly wasn’t the best. But the CD opened a musical world to me that screamed exclusivity. Most of my friends loved Reel Big Fish, even though the girls we chased after decidedly didn’t. The lyrics hit home with preteen angst, the choruses of “Everything Sucks” (I know everything sucks, yeah/And this is gonna be the last time you hear me complain) and “Nothin’ ” (Everytime I try so hard/I get nothin’, nothin’/They say try and you won’t fail/I get nothin’, nothin’) resonating with my geeky, outcast mind.

Reel Big Fish also opened my doors to the guilty-pleasure ska genre that still gets me jumping today. If not for that album, which I had to replace twice because the CD was too scratched to play, I would have never listened to Less than Jake, Streetlight Manifesto, Five Iron Frenzy or Suicide Machines.

Even now, after a long day of work, I like to unwind with a cold one and the hard rock riffs of “Beer,” which is featured in my favorite film to date and another guilty pleasure: “BASEketball.” I know it’s juvenile, and I know there are many songs and artists that have tugged on my heartstrings more than Reel Big Fish. But I’ll always come back to that first album as the music that made me fall in love with music. Even if it was in an effort to “Sell Out.”

Kip Hill covers county government for The Spokesman-Review. If you have a Story of the Album to share, email carolynl@spokesman.com