Bud Scoppa writes...

February 18, 2006

This was on the "Hits Magazine" site. Someone bless Bud Scoppa. Once again an important footnote to a bigger story.

3. The Odds, “Someone Who’s Cool” (Elektra, 1996): I didn’t even get around to checking out the CBS series Love Monkey until the day I learned the show was “on hiatus” after three low-rated episodes (by which time the DVR had unilaterally eliminated the first two). That’s a pity, not only because the episode I viewed was a far wittier fiction about A&R weaseldom than it had any right to be, but also because the show’s star, Tom Cavanagh, had convinced music supervisor Nic Harcourt to make the theme song a 10-year-old single by an obscure and long-defunct Vancouver band…a band that I’d signed to Zoo and A&R’d late in the last century. When it came on, my ears instantly perked up, but it took me a minute to realize what I was hearing, since I had no frame of reference. "I know this song—I LOVE this song," I thought to myself. “The clanging guitars and the wounded but game lead vocal most of all.” Then it hit me—the voice belonged to my old pal Craig Northey, and the song was the closest thing to a hit the Odds ever had in the States. Just the luck of this edgy/cuddly band, for whom the timing was always slightly off—and continues to be, long after their breakup. As a Beatles-loving, groove-pumping pop group with a sharp, twisted world view, the Odds foreshadowed Spoon, and if that means anything to you, look around for “Someone Who’s Cool” online—unless you remembered to set your DVR to “Keep until I delete” for Love Monkey, in which case you already have a verse and chorus… Cosmically, as I was writing this, TNT ran a Heineken spot improbably featuring Big Star’s “I’m in Love With A Girl,” immediately followed by a car commercial that I swear had Harcourt doing the voiceover. —Bud Scoppa