"It was the first time that I really got passionate about what I was doing," says Quirk, regarding his contribution to ... Finally. "Everything else had been accidental before."
Life appears to be looking up again for Too Much Joy. The band has a new deal with Discovery Records and is back to its mildly offensive ways. ... Finally's cover -- illustrated by Doug Allen, a Robert Crumb imitator/enthusiast -- features a cartoon image of a teenage couple lying in bed post-coitus, while a thought bubble looms over their heads containing the CD's title. Those who get their hands on an uncensored copy of ... Finally (there are two versions available) can have the pleasure of folding down a cover flap to reveal the two teens' naked bodies.
"It was one of the first times we got exactly what we wanted on the cover," Quirk says. "We just told the guy to go ahead and draw the naked people, and we just sort of assumed all along that someone was gonna say 'no' at some point. But it never happened."
Instead, the label suggested the band offer an underwear-clad alternative for the more conservative Wal-mart crowd. "We were fighting for the penis," Quirk giggles. "And we decided that as long as the penis is available, and people have the option of that little surprise bonus, then it was okay."
Musically, ... Finally is loaded with much of the same snotty, rambunctious, deliriously catchy noise candy that Too Much Joy helped define on Son of Sam I Am. Led along by Quirk's talky, unschooled vocals and a store of memorable hooks, songs such as "Skyline," "How to Be Happy" and the single, "The Kids Don't Understand," pay respect to TMJ's '60s and '70s idols without glazing over the rough-hewn garage-band recklessness that inspired them to start a band in the first place. The CD was produced by William Wittman, who, during the '80s, recorded bands such as the Outfield and the Fixx. Wittman was also producer for Mutiny, and after that CD, when Smallens split to become a full-time music writer for the Prodigy computer service, Wittman joined the band as its guitarist.
"Bill [Wittman] was rolling in dough in the '80s," Quirk says. "When we had our first meeting with him, we kept saying 'Clash, Clash, Clash.' He said, 'I love the Clash, too. But what you guys remind me of more is the Who, which is who the Clash were trying to be in the first place.'
"So, even though we hated almost everything he'd ever done, we hired him."
Whether they want to take credit for it or not, Too Much Joy was working the pop-punk connection years before Green Day's Billie Joe and his pals even approached their instruments. The band began in the early '80s as a teenage lark. Guitarists Jay Blumenfield and Smallens decided to put their music lessons to work and form a Clash cover band, recruiting Vinton from a nearby Catholic institution. An old chum of Smallens, Quirk essentially pouted his way into the band as lead singer. At the time, Southern rock was the music of choice in the affluent suburb of Scarsdale, New York, where the band members grew up. The group quickly realized that the local market for new wave and punk covers was slim at best, and began recording demos of their original work.
After high school, everyone headed for college -- Smallens to Yale, Blumenfield to the University of California at Berkeley, Quirk to Stanford and Vinton to Iowa, then the New York Police Academy. The band continued to record on holiday breaks, and the results of those sessions became the largely overlooked Green Eggs and Crack. In 1988, a year after the members were graduated from college, TMJ managed to eke out a record deal with the tiny Alias label. They headed off to Venice, California, to record Son of Sam I Am on a shoestring budget. Teeming with twisted power-pop ingenuity, the release landed the group the big-label deal they were looking for. Then, a little more than a year later, Too Much Joy hit a wall. Cereal Killers was supposed to be the band's breakthrough, but it never really exploded; two years later, Mutiny failed to play off the little momentum generated by its predecessor.
"People liked us, but in a really dismissive way," says Quirk. "We were making jokes, and, supposedly, that was not what rock was about. There's a line on Mutiny that says, 'I'm ahead of my time, but only by a week.' We've felt that way for 12 years. It's not like we are these total visionaries. We've had clever ideas, but we didn't have the money to pull them off before someone with deep pockets got to them."
