(SPOILER ALERT:  In this episode, we peel back the mystery behind a great DC band from the 1980s -- and in the process, prove once and for all that alt-rock luminary Mitch Easter is, in fact, extremely pleasant and a joy to work with in the studio.  Prepare to be shocked by the astonishing truth!)

Washington, D.C. has been home to a lot of great music over the years, but one of the unsung heroes of the scene in the 1980s was Hyaa!, who deserved to be at the leading edge of the alternative-rock “revolution” alongside bands like The Pixies and The Throwing Muses.

​Hyaa was guitarist Alice Despard, Les Doerfler on bass and John Moreman (later Alex DeSeabra) on drums. Alice wrote most of the songs, and her guitar and vocals cut through the alt-rock blabla of the time: a voice in turns muscular and gentle, guitar playing that avoided the cliches but invited you in, lyrics that were sometimes inscrutable but carried the weight of the world. 

​Hyaa even made two minor league records, one of which was produced by Mitch Easter, probably the most sought-after indie rock producer of the day. So what happened? 

Alice, Les, and Mitch Easter explain how Hyaa! came about, and give us their theories on why it didn’t work out. And Alice, who continues to write, play and record, explains where music has taken her — and where she’s taken music — from there.

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Our latest episode of Shoulda Beens takes us to Long Beach, a tiny seaside hamlet on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. In 1981, three teenage boys formed a band called Next Window, and for the next few years wrote and recorded some exciting, on-trend, and vital “new wave” music — the kind of thing you would expect to hear in places like New York, London, or Los Angeles. But Next Window’s pop/punk music came out of Long Beach, a town of 16,000 people about an hour and a half from Hattiesburg. Which is maybe two hours from Jackson, or three from New Orleans. It’s nowhere.

And yet — give Next Window a listen, and you’ll hear Blondie, Bowie, early XTC, Buzzcocks, Wall of Voodoo. In the early 80s, that stuff could be hard to find even in the Big City, so how were they channeling it in Long Beach?

The answer has a lot to do with what happens when you combine clever kids, small town boredom, and a need to do whatever it takes to avoid getting shanghai-ed into the football team or bible study. The band obsessively inhaled every issue of Creem, Hit Parader, and Rolling Stone they could find in the local bait and tackle shop, and stole away to bigger towns (with record stores!), like Biloxi or Mobile, to find the weird music these magazines said was essential listening for cool people.

It also helped to have a precocious songwriter on staff. Guitarist Brian Huddell had that rare talent that allowed him to listen to something new in the morning and be performing his own version of it by bedtime. His deep aversion to being the center of attention would cause problems later, but while he was still willing to take the stage, he and his bandmates had *it* — that thing that makes other bands simply give up rather than follow them on stage. (No, really, that literally happened — you’ll hear it straight from a member of the band they broke up.)

Because live, they were blistering. They may have been big fish in a small pond, but anybody who’d heard the sounds from the louder, bigger urban undergrounds knew that Next Window were the real deal. They could have gone places.

So what went wrong? Well, it’s complicated, but it has a lot to do with being happy enough in a small pond. And a songwriter’s intense discomfort playing in front of other people. And bad habits. And lots of other stuff that all worked out OK in the end. Listen to learn more.

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Exclusive song downloads available at www.shouldabeens.com! Support this artist and help spread the word about our mission by buying copies of the tracks you hear in this episode -- and thanks!

In the post-punk, college rock world of the 1980s, the American South seemed poised to rise again, thanks to the wide-eyed, DIY enthusiasm of bands and artists like REM, the dBs, Mitch Easter and Let’s Active.  These groups looked beyond the blues-fueled cliches of “southern rock” and created a brainy new kind of guitar pop that owed more to Television, Devo, and XTC than it did Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers.

In eastern Tennessee, John T. Baker was watching. He’d spent nearly two years on the road fronting a cover band that played every frat house, night club, and Indian casino in the southeast. But being a human jukebox for a living, even a good living, was getting old. He started writing songs that he had no time — and no band — to play, and he couldn’t stop.

So Baker walked away from his $1,500-a-night cover band, moved to Memphis, and formed the Martini Age, a guitar-centric pop band that proudly wore its Gang Of Four, Robyn Hitchcock, and Richard Thompson heart on its sleeve.  He locked himself in the attic with his cassette four-track and wrote music — and more music, and even more music.  Some of it was beautiful, some of it was brutal, and, yeah, some of it was downright weird.  But all of it was worth hearing.

Sadly, none of the record labels Baker approached agreed. By the early 90s, the louder, simpler, angrier music coming out of the pacific northwest ruled the industry, and crafty, melodic bands like the Martini Age were left to wither on the vine.

But Baker’s story didn’t end there.  Tune into this episode to find out what happened next, and how John T. Baker has kept the Southern art-rock faith for the last 30 years.

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Exclusive song downloads available at www.shouldabeens.com! Support this artist and help spread the word about our mission by buying copies of the tracks you hear in this episode -- and thanks!