By 1992 the music scene was shifting from the 80’s Hair bands over the Grunge and Alternative. Bands were getting dropped left and right from their record labels and replaced with a new breed of music.
Bands like Motley Crue, Ratt and Poison didn’t help their cause by having internal issues, and by this time the new bands like Trixter, Nelson and Firehouse were looked at as third generation bands that were essentially “Pop” artists at this point.
But there were still bands that were what I call “In-betweeners”. They actually had fans on both sides of the aisle, or at the very least they Grunge fans didn’t hate them. Ugly Kid Joe was probably the epitome of those bands that got stuck between the shift.
Their name alone was apparently chosen as a slam on “Pretty Boy Floyd” who took the Glam to the Nth degree. The guys in Ugly Kid Joe openly stated they weren’t about the whole glam scene and in hindsight they probably fit better alongside Pearl Jam.
The PROBLEM is that Ugly Kid Joe had a biting sense of humor and actually seemed to be having fun, and that was too 80’s for the Grunge scene who seemed to take life a little too serious and preferred to exist in a state of misery.
“Neighbor” was essentially about a white trash family moving to the suburbs. It featured the “Pat” character from SNL. The video was also featured on MTV’s Beavis and Butt-head. Despite all that it never really went anywhere. “Everything About You” and the Harry Chapin cover “Cats In The Cradle” were the two big singles.
Lifelong friends and founding members Whitfield Crane and Klaus Eichstadt have kept the band together on and off over the years and they still have a strong following thanks mostly to the success of this album.
