Rewind: moe. - Tin Cans and Car Tires (1998)
You know you’re getting long in the tooth when you followed the Grateful Dead and the bands that came behind them have now been around for more than a quarter-century.
moe. - lower case with a period - is one of those groups. And as it preps the 25th-anniversary, remastered vinyl edition of 1998’s Tin Cans and Car Tires, Sound Bites listened back to the original LP to determine if he still loves it like he once did.
This is a collection of relatively compact songs by a band that was already stretching waaaaay out on stage, but was looking for radio success with songs like Rob Derhak’s funky rocker “Stranger than Fiction” and Al Schnier’s plaintive “Letter Home.”
It didn’t work. And moe.’s more-adventurous side, represented here with such Frank Zappa-inspired tracks as “Spaz Medicine” and “Head,” with their tricky time signatures and, in the case of the former, freak-jazz horn charts, became the group’s go-to formula for better and for not better.
The chief moe.rons were young cats still finding their sound when they made Tin Cans and Car Tires and filled it with Allman-esque slide guitar and other homages. This youthful searching is evidenced by the gleeful too-fucking-high refrain in the otherwise-morbid “Plane Crash;” their nod to the Grateful Dead’s “The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)” on Chuck Garvey’s angular “Hi & Lo;” and the unabashed nicking of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on “It.”
There’s reggae in the form of “Happy Hour Hero” and twangy county in “Queen of the Rodeo.” And while the songwriting isn’t particularly original, it’s inspired and infused with the sound of hungry musicians looking for their bite at the mushroom.
In the years since Tin Cans, moe. became its own thing with its own sound and style. And while that is the point of every group - Dark Star Orchestra and that ilk excepted - Sound Bites enjoyed moe. most when it proudly wove its influences into its original music and wasn’t above playing an entire Furthur Festival-opening set dedicated to the Dead’s “That’s it for the Other One” suite.
Grade card: moe. - Tin Cans and Car Tires (1998) - B+
