The Giant Panther

Dada was a three piece California band that surfaced in 1992. They hit the airwaves with a fun song called "Dizz Knee Land" that some of you may recall. It actually reached number 5 on the Billboard Modern Rock Charts if you can trust Wikipedia to deliver the facts. Their CD "Puzzle" actually moved half a million copies based on this song for the most part. Not bad. Unfortunately for these guys their label, IRS, was under financial duress and folded just after they released their third CD and they descended into relative one hit wonder status. They immediately signed with MCA, which was usually a mistake (see Skynyrd, Lynyrd for a little background on working with those guys...hey, that gives me an idea for a future blog...Mercury Poisoning by Graham Parker...EMI by The Sex Pistols...I could probably cobble together a list of pretty decent songs by artists disenchanted by their label...I'd probably run out of labels though...nobody was happy it seems), just before they were sold.

Dada went on to record for seven more years before calling it a day in 1999. Naturally they re-surfaced again in 2003 and seem to be still kicking around. The more I look into the history of bands I respect, the more I find they are still trying to make a go of it in a music industry absolutely crushed (kind of like a Wav file condensed into an MP3 file ironically huh?). I guess since I'm not out every night of the week anymore I am just not noticing just exactly who is playing The Paradise in between the quarterly shows I seem to find interesting enough to withstand the aforementioned bad sight lines over there. Who is sneaking into Harper's Ferry when I'm not looking I wonder. Where is Dada playing and who is playing them? Beats the heck out of me, but I did want to post a song from Puzzle that I really liked. I hear them at the gym and then I forget to post them, but not this time...

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow has a great old school story telling feel to it. It's part rockabilly, part surf and part rock. It doesn't rock as hard as Face The Day in the post directly below this one, but it winds its way through an interesting tale of picking up a hitchhiker named Tina and robbing a bank, but it's the music that I really like. I sometimes don't look at song lyrics because when I see them on paper I'm ultimately disappointed in the brevity or the seemingly nonsensical story line. I used to argue with myself when I was young about whether it was the lyrics or the music that moved me, but now I understand the music has always been the draw for me. I like a well written line on top of it, but without the melody forget it. Just my two cents. OK, without further ado, I present Dada's Greatest Hit as voted on by me. Take a listen and hopefully you'll have a new tune for your iPod.