Rotator Cuff, the forgotten little band only I loved

I need to take a little trip back into Music Nostalgiaville for a moment. Not for any reason, just because. I’m going to do it with a cut from a band called Rotator Cuff.

(If you want to skip the story and go right to the music, go below.)

This band was completely local, so I acknowledge this is ’90s nostalgia for no one but me. It’s not even all that nostalgic for people in my area. This song got a decent amount of airplay on WHTG 106.3, which back in the day was one of the most important college rock stations in the northeast. Matt Pinfield of 120 Minutes was an alt rock icon locally thanks to his time there, and that’s where I (sort of) knew him (in the real life sense) from. This particular song didn’t exactly dominate the airwaves, it was just big enough to hear it a decent amount — and on a station that was this small, that isn’t much.

Thing is, for me and a few friends it was kind of a big deal because it was from some local guy who did British-style rock with a band called Dandelion Fire. The dude was obviously WAY into the British scene at the time. So were we. If it was coming out of England and had guitars washed in reverb and echoed vocals by people who sort of breathed rather than sang, we loved it.

And Dandelion Fire? Hell, this band was from New Jersey, not Jersey, so for us other NJ guys into that scene it was cool to have some homegrown stuff.

But Dandelion Fire never hit it big. They were too late to the scene, and the scene never got all that big anyway, so the dude followed it up with this band Rotator Cuff.

Pretty sure they only ever did one EP. It was okay. That’s it, just okay. The main single from it, though, was FUCKING KILLER.  I love the sound of the guitar, the simplicity of the song, the melody … all of it. It’s still a favorite. Truth is, my friends liked Dandelion Fire more than I did. I found them derivative without adding anything new to what they were riffing on, so that made then C list. But I LOVED this song by the band that followed.

So if I were to ever make a throwback early 1990s mixtape, this would for sure end up on it:

I mean, damn. I still love it.