In Praise of I Get Wet

New Afterword site, new opportunity for me to write a paean to a record virtually nobody else actually likes.

Andrew W.K. I Get Wet. Officially my 6th favourite album of all time. Officially the soundtrack to the single best gig I’ve ever attended in my entire life.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let me take you back… back…. back….. back….

It is the year of our lord, 2001. The inkies are relentlessly hyping a new act named Andrew W.K. Very few people have heard a note of his music – it’s not on Napster yet – and all most of us know of him is a single image, the image which will eventually grace the front cover of his debut album, and which Dave Grohl will later describe as “the most beautiful photo of a man I’ve ever seen”. It promises so much: the bloody nose, the sweaty hair, the defiant look.

My first encounter with the music itself was… underwhelming. Saturday morning television. Ant & Dec, I believe. Some genius at the record company had decided that “Party Hard”, the lead single, had potential mainstream appeal and would probably benefit from being played to an audience of ten year olds. Now at this stage, AWK was accompanied by a red-hot band of grizzled metal scene veterans, alternately either extremely hairy or completely bald, and pretty scary to a man. The sight of them playing to small children was – ahem – unorthodox, but the song itself didn’t seem up to much: imagine if peak Meatloaf had decided to ditch the restraint, multi-track guitars everywhere and write endless lyrics proselyting on the virtues of partying. It wasn’t what I’d been hoping for.

Undeterred, I decided to give W.K. a second chance. The NME wouldn’t lie to me about an exciting new artist after all: there just HAD to be something there worth the hearing. I duly sought out a Virgin Megastore listening post on the week of release and flipped through the tracks. Every single one of them sounded like the lead single, only perhaps more so. The entire record seemed to have precisely the same tempo, and was overcoated with a production so slick and shiny that it felt positively nauseating. They may as well have laminated it. No, I thought, this was not for me. Nice idea, shame about the music. The album duly bombed.

Years passed. Years and years. Time in which I thought very little about Andrew W.K. and what he might be doing. Occasionally, he’d enter my field of vision: a song on the soundtrack of the Jackass movie (a match made in heaven right there), a new album with the curious title “Close Calls with Brick walls”, and so on. But I wasn’t tempted to go back and investigate further. Until one fateful day, when his name came up in conversation with a mate, and virtually simultaneously I stumbled upon this interview: http://freewilliamsburg.com/april_2002/andrew_wk.html Something about it piqued my interest. He came across like a kind of deranged motivational speaker, and this particular quote totally jumped out at me:

“I just want to use the best things we have now to get the music to be as huge and slammingly loud and big as possible. There are no rules. There’s nothing not cool. There are no worries as to what’s cool or what’s right. There’s no hiding and letting walls going up. I want my world to be like BAM get away BAM no walls! Wow! Look how wide it is?”

For starters, it made me laugh out loud. But it was also so gloriously earnest as to be endearing. A quick Google lead me to more gold: rumours that AWK’s whole career had been a prank, that he had been replaced several times with doppelgangers, a deranged article in the Guardian about his first love and how badly wrong it had gone. Clearly, he hadn’t crawled into a hole and given up after his lack of initial success. He’d carried on and seemingly found some sort of audience. He seemed resolutely unbowed. I went back to the album.

And the album… wasn’t anywhere near as bad as I’d remembered it. Okay, the production was still hokey, but the concept of a whole record of songs about partying, played loud and fast and with a demented ringmaster dragging you along and imploring you to seize the day… I could probably find a place in my life for that. As I listened, I continued to root around online, and more gems emerged.

AWK giving the greatest interview ever to Fox News:

AWK playing what looked like the single most off the hook gig I’d ever seen:

I pushed the album on some mates, and we collectively developed a kind of ironic group love for I Get Wet. We dug how head-down it was, how uncool it was, we dug the riffage and the total lack of variety in the lyrical content. We dug the fact that it contained a song called Party Til You Puke. And we dug the total lack of ballads or slow tunes, the sheer relentlessness. When Andrew W.K. lead the call to party we came to understand that he didn’t mean a literal act of self destruction, he simply meant to go hard in whatever you might be doing, to live life to the turbo charged max and to love your brotherman. Yeah!

Then suddenly, in 2012, it was announced that W.K. was going to tour the album to celebrate its tenth anniversary. He would play London, and the venue would be Kentish Town Forum. Laughing among ourselves, we quickly booked tickets, and trooped along, all in our early 30s and knowing that there was a high chance that this whole event might totally nose dive – what could be sadder than a bunch of (kind of) old people reliving their youth via the playing of what was intrinsically an album about youth and youthful vitality?

We arrived on the night fearing the worse. As we waited for things to kick off a friend pointed out to me that there seemed to be an awful lot of young people in attendance. In fact, we almost seemed like the oldest people there. Perhaps this wasn’t going to be the nostalgia-fest we’d anticipated. I looked around and realised he was spot on – the crowd was about 90% teenagers, and there was a low mania hanging over their heads, as if they’d been primed to go off. “How the fuck do this lot know this record” we asked.

But there wasn’t time for an answer, because the show duly began.

What followed… well, I struggle to put it into words. He played the album, in sequence. The crowd went utterly, utterly monkeyshit for each and every tune, singing along like they’d known them all their lives. AWKworked them shamelessly, geeing them up between songs, inviting them onstage to share the mic and turning the entire event into a demented communal stompalong. There was no reserve, no sense of “cool/uncool”, no them and us – we dissolved into a sweating, pogoing mess and there was constant movement everywhere. Within the hour, we’d seen a kid in a head to toe banana costume repeatedly stage dive, Andrew W.K. play a solo on a custom guitar shaped like a slice of pizza and a collective rendition of “Party Til You Puke” that felt like might just kill us all. Andrew W.K. quite clearly didn’t care how he looked, or what it all sounded like: he simply wanted to make sure that those in attendance had the absolute best time possible. To this day, I have no idea how all these kids had become aware of I Get Wet, but it quickly became clear that the concept of a lunatic playing loud songs about partying to a room full of teenagers was so potent as to be downright undeniable. Why couldn’t all gigs be like this?

Throughout proceedings, the crowd chanted for “We Want Fun”, a single not originally included on the album but which had appeared on the Jackass soundtrack. He played it as the encore, and the place went well and truly off. The stage invasions had been mounting all night, but now security simply stood aside and let the inevitable occur – the single largest assault on a stage to which I have ever been witness. By the end of the song, there were more people treading the boards than left on the venue floor. Punters could be seen crowd surfing across the heads of those onstage. You could hear fans beating on the cymbals. AWK was lost to all sight, submerged in a crowd of well wishers, and a dozen different voices took vocal duties as the band simply played the song again.

There’s footage of the event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFHURZWzNwI It captures only a fraction of the overall madness.

We emerged from the gig with eyes like saucers and feet six inches off the ground. I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited in my entire life. I basically didn’t sleep for two days and quickly penned a breathless account of events on the old Word site. It’s lost to me now, perhaps forever, so I’m writing this as a sort of replacement. It took me about a week to return to normal cognitive function, and jangled my senses good and proper.

It was a night I don’t think I’ll ever forget. It took me some time to reconcile myself to the fact that the best show I’ve ever seen was played by a man who appears to wear the same white jeans and t-shirt every day of his life and who talks like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, but eventually I made my peace with it. What had started off as a dismissal had moved through ironic enjoyment until finally – finally – emerging as full blown love. Not just me, but all my mates as well. When I listen to I Get Wet now it sounds like nothing else. It energises me, it makes me smile and I couldn’t give a flying one if it’s technically a good record because it makes me absolutely buzz my tits off. And isn’t that what it should all be about, really?

So yeah: when it’s time to party, I will always party hard. Those who are with me: I salute you!

http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/andrew_wk.jpg

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