My Top 1000 Songs #742: Bazooka Joe

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.] 

Oddly vivid record store memories:

For a brief time in the 90s, the late, lamented Tower Records installed these cool Listening Station kiosks. They'd have a dozen new releases loaded into the machine, jukebox style, and you could slip on some headphones and preview the CDs before purchasing. Not quite like some of the used record stores I used to haunt, where you could bring a stack of vinyl to the turntable and check 'em out--you were limited to the dozen newish CDs they'd decided to make available for preview--but, still, it was a nice feature.

Anyway, I remember stopping at the San Mateo, CA Tower one day on the way home from work--this was shortly after I moved to the suburbs and was commuting into San Francisco every day--and, as was my habit, checking out the Listening Station. They usually had a few mainstream releases, a couple alternative albums, and, if you were lucky, maybe something a little more obscure. On this occasion, in the latter category, they had a pretty cool 1994 power pop compilation called Yellow Pills Volume 2, packed with mostly unreleased goodies from artists I already knew--Matthew Sweet, Shoes, Material Issue, 20/20, Wondermints--as well as a lot of music from unfamiliar artists.

My favorite song on the collection was "Bazooka Joe," from Parthenon Huxley (also known as just P. Hux, and the alter ego of musician Rick Miller). It's a wonderful little pop song, ridiculously melodic and packed with angelic harmonies, just the way I like my pop songs! (It later showed up on a 2006 collection of early P. Hux recordings called Mile High Fan.) He's not an artist I've closely followed (he's had a fair number of releases in the years since), but the song stuck, one of those obscure nuggets in my collection that I've found myself randomly humming out of nowhere for 30 years.