“I don’t think I was particularly conscious of doing it, but I started to do that live to try and make it slightly more interesting for myself.
“My main memory of that was that my mom got mad at me because I sort of changed the phrasing of one of the lines,” Nelson recalls over the phone. So much so, in fact, that the singer can only laugh now while reflecting on how it all went. The whole thing looked like a band not giving a shit, but more importantly, the performance that night felt like a band not giving a shit. There were a few of them the Seattle quartet made that night, despite how hungry, energized and out-right bad-ass they looked, guitarist Jeff Lin seemingly breaking a string by song’s end and drummer Evan Sult circling his kit during an extended bridge colored by cymbal rolls and elongated crooning from Nelson himself. It was the band’s network television debut, and looking back on it today, lead singer Sean Nelson bristles at the memories surrounding the appearance, despite hindsight’s occasional ability to compromise regretful decisions. They performed “Flagpole Sitta”, their super-catchy, subversively delicious radio hit that would ultimately catapult their tiny $3,000 debut album Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone? into America’s mainstream. In 1998, Harvey Danger appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman. As we interacted with the music business, we were told all the time that we should be writing songs that were more like ‘Flagpole Sitta’, but we didn’t really either know how to do it or want to do it because what we really wanted was to be taken seriously, which is a fatal flaw for a band.”
Even though we were very serious about what we did, it wasn’t at the cost of having fun. “The first record, it requires less intense focus.
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