Listening Room: Toad the Wet Sprocket — “Little Heaven”
After high school and on and off throughout my college years, I worked at Blockbuster Video. Those of you who have ever frequented video stores are probably familiar with the preview tapes that are played on the monitors in the store. There is no escape from it. You get one trailer, per month. If you work 3-4 six hour shifts over the course of a week, you will hear the same movie advertisements approximately 18-24 times in a week. Employees of the video store go beyond familiar. We memorize those fuckers. We don’t memorize them by choice. Those trailers are relentlessly embedded in our mindguts.
Before Buffy The Vampire Slayer became a TV cult favorite, it was a (probably dreadful) movie starring Kristy Swanson and Luke Perry. When Buffy came to video, which I should note was about 15 minutes after it was released in theaters, we got a tape that had a trailer for the movie. During a scene in which Buffy is at a high school dance, a clip of “Little Heaven†is played. For years, I had no idea that little sound clip was a Toad song.
I was far too cool to watch anything with Puke Perry. I was far too cool to watch a campy high school vampire movie. I never watched the movie and was not going to be caught dead buying the soundtrack to said movie. It wasn’t until Toad released their rarities set In Light Syrup that I put all of this together.
The movie was released the summer of 1992. It showed up on videotape August 1993. Syrup was released in 1995. Two years later, within the first two or three seconds I could still immediately connect that song clip to the Buffy trailer.
It’s a great song, and it should have been included on a proper record. It deserved a much kinder fate than Buffy- well, at least kinder than the Buffy movie. Dean Dinning and Todd Nichols’ haunting, droning harmonies give the song a hypnotic ambiance. The song washes over you, slowly, like “riding waves of doubt.†I don’t know if it is because of the Buffy trailer, but I rarely listen to this song just once. When I listen to it, as I did tonight, it’s on repeat.
“Little Heaven†is the antidote to the curse of Buffy.
Filed under: Tags: Citzen Dick, Listening Room, Toad the Wet Sprocket
The Buffy movie isn’t all that bad. It’s pretty fluffy and the plot went nowhere, but it was a lot of fun, at least in my memories. And it had Paul Reubens in a non-Peewee role which is always interesting.
the only Toad that i have is a way cool, acoustic cover of “Rock ‘n Roll All Nite”
That’s a good one, Saleski. Very good band, worth checking into. Might I suggest Dulcinea.
Sorry, Mat, I just can’t go there.
Dulcinea would be my recommendation, too, Mark, so now you have to pick up a copy. Absolutely one of my all-time favorite albums. Really wish I’d gotten to see them before they broke up (yeah, I know they reformed for a tour recently, but they only hit a small number of cities far away from me.)