Harvey Danger's Song Flagpole Sitta is extremely misunderstood.
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The Seattle band Harvey Danger would rise to prominence in the late 90’s thanks to their hit Flagpole Sitta. Rolling Stone would name "Flagpole Sitta," as one of the top 25 songs of the 90’s but the song was greatly misunderstood. Lets explore why in today’s video.
Formed in Seattle during the height of grunge in 1993, Harvey Danger started out as a joke. The band would be formed by university of washington students, guitarist Jeff Lin and bassist Aaron Huffman The pair had never learned to play guitar or bass but would learn to play music from jamming with one another. They would soon add frontman Sean Nelson and drummer Evan Sult who also attended the university of washington. The quartet soon became roomates and began jamming on nirvana and mudhoney covers at college parties . Aside from playing music, and being students they also worked for the college’s student newspaper called The Daily. Rumors around the time of the band’s first album coming out claimed they got their named soccer player Timmy Harvey or from the nickname of former major league baseball player Harmon Killebrew. When in actuality Harvey Danger’s name originated from a graffiti character that was drawn on the wall at the University of Washington.
Sult would tell AV Club Sult remembers the early days of the band in 1992-1993, “None of us were walking around in big leather jackets. We weren’t that world.” Nelson would add: “We were this very hermetic group. We weren’t really part of the Seattle [scene]… We weren’t really part of any community.” The band would spend it’s first five years together playing house parties and club shows in Seattle.
The band would put out there first album Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone? on local label The Arena Rock Recording Company. The label was run by Greg Glover, who was also an intern at major label London/Slash Records. Nelson would tell the AV Club. “[Greg] wasn’t the very first person who ever believed in us, but he was the first person who was ever willing to put his money and his time on the line to work with us.”
The band’s debut album would be made for $3,000 and had an initial pressing of 1,000 copies
Despite hailing from Seattle the band’s sound drew more comparisons to alternative rock pioneers Weezer and the replacements in addition to ben folds five, the posies than the grunge bands who came out of the pacific northwest in the early 90’s. Harvey Danger’s lyrics intertwined troubled relationships with cynicism and paranoia. That’s not to say the music scene in seattle didn’t inspire the band lyrically. The breakout song on the band’s debut record Flagpole Sitta, was written about Seattle’s alternative music scene becoming co-opted and commodified. The AV Club perfectly summarized the song saying
“Flagpole Sitta” finds Harvey Danger exploring the tension between being both a cultural observer and a participant—when you’re self-aware enough to notice how the underground is being co-opted, but yet simultaneously caught up in (and horrified by) this commodification.
Drummer Evan Sult would would tell AV Club how the song captured what the early 90’s in seattle felt like saying “I think it’s a really true version of what it felt like to be alive, at least in Seattle [when] we actually wrote it. The ironic remove and the innate suspicion of both the mainstream culture and the alternative culture, and the yearning to be part of something, but not being able to get around the suspicion and the self-loathing.
Frontman Sean Newlson would end up working across the street from a local Seattle DJ Named Marco Collins who worked for rock station KNDD. They would end up bumping into one another with Nelson telling the AV Club
“I was exactly the kind of person who always had copies of our record in my backpack,” “Though it was an embarrassing, tacky move, I believed in our band, and I was ambitious at that time, so I was like, ‘Well, what the hell? What could I lose? What’s the worst that could happen?’”
Lucky for the band Collins started playing “Flagpole Sitta”and the impact was immediate as within several weeks the song was being played in other major markets. Sult would tell AV Club “We started getting calls from friends around the country, like in Flo
