Hose Got Cable: Fuck (from Majesty, 1995)
The first show I saw after I’d moved to Arizona in 1995 was a little record store down the street from ASU called Eastside Records. I’d recently made a friend in my dorm who not only knew what indie rock was—the first person I’d ever met outside of my high school buddies who spoke that language—but who was also plugged into the scene in Tempe and Phoenix. (I’ll tell that story another time.) She came by my dormroom one night and said there was a show down the street, so we headed over. We missed the opening locals, but the headliner was some band from Richmond, VA, called Hose Got Cable.
My mind was obliterated.
Here was a band going positively apeshit to a crowd of maybe thirty kids. The music was all over the place—starting, stopping, quiet, loud. Two guys screaming breathlessly into their mics, the drummer hitting the skins like a fucking octopus. It put every local punk show I’d seen in my hometown of Fresno to shame.
For whatever reason I was either too dumb or too broke to buy their album then and there. A few months later I was in another record store in town, leafing through a basket of CDs too ghetto to actually have real jewel cases when I came across the white-sleeved disc with nothing but a silhouetted owl on the cover. A little sticker was affixed in the corner with the words “Hose Got Cable” hand written. It was that band! I took it home.
When I returned to Fresno on my first winter break, seeing all my old friends for the first time, I played Majesty for everyone, especially track two, “Fuck.” (I know, I know.) Hose Got Cable wasn’t exactly a revelation in the musical sense—I was already deep into Drive Like Jehu by then—but it was the first band I’d seen that really drove home the idea that this was my world. This was something I could be a part of. This was a world I could participate in. Albums like Yank Crime or Spiderland felt to me almost, I don’t know, immaculate, untouchable, unreachable. I couldn’t connect to those albums or bands on any level other than being a total fanboy. My Fresno local scene, while it had a few great bands, still felt disconnected from the world of legitimately released records and touring acts. There in Tempe, seeing a band from Richmond tear the doors off a little record store walking distance from where I lived—I was somewhere else.
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