Song Of The Day 4/28/2016: The Tubes – “Sushi Girl”
More Songs About Eating and Food – Well, you've got the Tubes here. That's what you got. Fee Waybill, who I guarantee would have been a much bigger star as a frontman had Comedy Central been around in the late '70s. There's a real Albert Brooks quality to him I felt was untapped. Outside of San Francisco and New York, the Tubes' outlandish parody stage shows with far underplayed subtlety couldn't get a date with the most logical audience of their era, album-oriented rock radio. This is from their 1981 album The Completion Backward Principle which was produced, I kid you not, by David Foster ('80s Chicago and the St. Elmo's Fire soundtrack). It had one great song, "Talk To Ya Later," which should have worked its way into our '80s karaoke songbooks instead of things like "Summer of '69." It also had "Sushi Girl." As you might have expected exposure to exotic food during my upbringing years was, ahhh, somewhat limited, so I had no idea what sushi was. Yet I don't remember ever not liking sushi, even after the first time I tried it. I credit this song for making that possible, since it took me decades to love cilantro because nobody ever did a song about it. The Tubes did this song on a notorious episode of SCTV, in which the band participated in John Candy's sketch The Fishin' Musician. They basically recreated the video which you see here, the production values of which seem a little ahead of its time (1981).
