Why a Fake Band From a 1990s Kids’ Show Decided to Tour This Year
FOR A SONGWRITER, Mark Mulcahy can have a tough time expressing himself. Like, for starters, why exactly it took his band Polaris 15 years to finally treat fans to a live performance. Despite the group’s slow climb up the totem pole of indie rock respectability, Mulcahy says, there just wasn’t much of an urge to take the band on the road.
“It’s weird. I don’t know why, we could have been playing all these years,” he says over a fuzzy phone line from his home in New Haven, Connecticut. “It’s the strange world of Polaris.”
But it’s not actually all that strange: Polaris was a television show’s house band. A novelty act. Depending on the extent of your 1990’s knowledge, they’re either the band that sang “Hey Sandy,” the theme song to Nickelodeon’s The Adventures of Pete & Pete, or the band that released the ensuing albumMusic from The Adventures of Pete & Pete, which became something of a cult classic. Either way, Polaris is tied directly to the bizarre kids’ show that centered on two brothers’ attempts to navigate their suburban surroundings. Polaris was created for Pete & Pete, and they existed, until recently, only as an extension of the show—another relic from a long-ago age of intelligent, challenging children’s television.
But starting tomorrow, Polaris embarks on their first tour, performing material that was released back when Bill Clinton was still president. Their tour is split between traditional billings—like the show they’re headlining in Philadelphia—and Nickelodeon-themed nostalgia stops, including one at Chicago’s iconic Lincoln Hall, where the band will share the bill with a live taping of The Adventures of Danny and Mike, a podcast hosted by Pete & Pete’s two now-adult stars. There’s even a date at Brooklyn’s Knitting Factory—and it’s sold out.
So is it a fake band being taken seriously by a few fans, or a real band that others haven’t been taking seriously? Polaris (that’s Mulcahy on vocals and guitar, Scott Boutier on drums, and Dave McCaffrey on bass) is about to find out—or at least find out if their fans are passionate enough to shell out $20 for a ticket. Even Mulcahy seems to have no idea: “I really hope people come,” he says with a laugh, “but I have no idea.”
All You Need Is a Miracle (Legion)
Mulcahy is no stranger to the music scene. From 1983 to 1996 he fronted Miracle Legion, a college-rock outfit whose comparisons to R.E.M. can be either good or bad, depending on how you feel about R.E.M. He’s also had a viable career as a solo musician, with 2013’s Dear Mark J. Mulcahy, I Love You peaking at #37 on Billboard’s Heatseekers chart.
In 1993, towards the end of Miracle Legion’s run, Pete & Pete creators Will McRobb and Chris Viscardi approached Mulcahy about creating a theme song for the show. What they wound up with was fan favorite “Hey Sandy,” a song that lives on in part because of its indecipherable third line, which to this day remains a mystery. (If the lyric really is, as many fans have speculated, “Can you settle to shoot me?” then Nickelodeon was in a dark, dark place.)
“‘Hey Sandy’ was the main order, where they were like, ‘we need to have a theme song,’” says Mulcahy. “And then they asked for the other songs in kind of a descriptive way.” Three more songs were required for the show’s inaugural season—including “Summerbaby,” which the band played live on the first season’s finale. Once again, the process was interpretive: Viscardi and McRobb would communicate a particular emotion, and Mulcahy would create a song. “We were kind of in sync. That was [a] lucky combination of people,” Mulcahy says. “Will [McRobb] is just a great music fan. The show is a mix tape for him.”
That process continued on for the next three years: four new songs each year. By the time the show was cancelled in 1996, Polaris had produced 12 songs—just enough for a respectable rock LP.
But no album was forthcoming. “There you are with 12 songs that are all done and mixed, and all go really well together. What’s the problem?” Mulcahy asks. He never found out the answer to that question. Perhaps Viacom, Nickelodeon’s parent company, didn’t see much use in releasing an album by a fictitious band; maybe labels didn’t see much of a potential market inPete & Pete fans. Whatever the case, the album seemed like a lost cause, doomed to collect dust next to bins of green slime and Good Burger hats.
“Nickelodeon was like, ‘What do you mean put a record out? Who cares?’” says Mulcahy. “But they said, ‘If you want to put it out, you can.’ I was lucky that they let me put it out.”
With Nickelodeon’s indifferent blessing, Mulcahy used his own label to release these 12 songs. Music from The Adventures of Pete & Pete came out in 1999, and in the years after the band—like the show—faded into anonymity.
As time passed, Mulcahy’s solo career gained steam; his band mates nabbed a gig backing up Pixies legend Frank Black. Polaris was for the most part a thing of the past, save for Mulcahy’s sporadic impulse to include one of the band’s songs in his set list.
An Unexpectedly Fun Thing I Thought I’d Never Do Again
In 2012, Mulcahy got a call about a Pete & Pete reunion. Cinefamily, an independent theater in Los Angeles, was hosting a live panel with the show’s cast and wanted Polaris to perform live. All parties agreed, and for the first time in over a decade the three band members started rehearsing the material again.
Going in to the gig, Mulcahy had the level of hope for success you’d expect from the lead singer of the house band for a long-since-cancelled children’s show. But the response was astounding: People actually sang along. “That was a couple thousand people—they really know the music,” he says. Even if that crowd largely consisted of Pete & Pete obsessives, fans are fans.
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PolarisNow, as Polaris prepares for its first ever tour, Mulcahy is curious to find out how many more fans are out there. “Playing will be some kind of way to realize what’s happening,” he says.
The band will even be unveiling some new songs, including one with the very Pete & Pete-esque name “Happy Green Moon Face.” Writing new material “is a total mistake, but I think it’s the only choice you have,” Mulcahy says with a laugh.
Maybe Mulcahy is so nonchalant about the whole thing because the whole thing is—to quote “Hey Sandy”—so smiling strange: TV house band records album’s worth of songs, album is released to little press, album gains cult following among people who like to be cult followers, band goes on tour 15 years later, hoping that time has worked in their favor.
Actually, the whole thing reads like an episode of Pete & Pete.
The Polaris tour starts tomorrow in Providence, RI. For dates and tickets, go to their Facebook page.
http://www.wired.com/2014/10/polaris-pete-and-pete-band/