BURIED TREASURE
Technically Ecstasy
Happy go lucky: Pernice Brothers, 1998 (from left) Thom Monahan, Bob Pernice, Joe Pernice, Peyton Pinkerton.
Dennis Kleiman
This month’s diamond espied in the dust: a marriage of beauteous pop and emotional pain.
Pernice Brothers
Overcome By Happiness
SUB POP, 1998
K NOCKING 30, a classic age for such activity, Joe Pernice was taking stock. A Master of Arts from U-Mass in Amherst for whom a career in teaching had beckoned, he was in a band – Scud Mountain Boys – with their third album released by Sub Pop and a keen following on the alt-countr y scene. What he knew and his bandmates didn’t, however, is that they were about to split.
“It was nothing personal,” the soft-spoken Pernice sighs today. “You know, those guys were some of my closest friends. But musically, I was just bored. We were pigeonholed as a sound – and to be fair, we kind of painted ourselves into that corner.”
With proceeds from the Scuds deal, Pernice had bought his first CD player and copies of Pink Moon and Sgt. Pepper’s. “Then I bought some Burt Bacharach and suddenly I was all over the shop,” he recalls. “I didn’t care if I was listening to Dinosaur Jr. or Carole King. The one thing I wasn’t listening to was countr y music.”