Harvey Danger

As you may remember, Harvey Danger vaulted to national prominence with the success of their debut LP, Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone? , which spawned the hit single "Flagpole Sitta." After four years of relative obscurity in Seattle, HD was snatched up by a major label (Slash/London Records), and the band was suddenly in heavy rotation on local and national radio airwaves, and all over MTV and VH1. The band toured for eight straight months that year, appearing on Letterman, Kilborn, TRL, and countless radio stations and regional TV programs. Harvey Danger's music was featured in a barrelful teen-centric movies and sitcoms, and their record went gold. La la la…

And then, they seemed to disappear.

After subsequent singles failed to duplicate the success of "Flagpole," the band entered the studio to record a follow-up album. While that LP was in being made, the music business entered a long phase of industry-wide consolidation, mergers, and restructuring that left Harvey Danger adrift in the corporate miasma for over a year. By the time King James Version was released in September 2000 on London/Sire Records, it had been a full two years since the success of "Flagpole Sitta," and the band's momentum was all but gone. KJV was greeted with excellent reviews and respectable sales, but was felled by distribution woes, and the absence of a single that captured the attention of radio programmers. After a few months of touring and a very expensive video which aired only twice, King James Version was declared dead by the label-which was itself defunct less than a year later-and the band went on an extended hiatus. It had been seven years, and everyone needed a break.

A few months ago, that hiatus came to a casual end when band members Sean Nelson, Jeff Lin, and Aaron Huffman came together on a lark to begin writing new material. Between Nelson's busy schedule as touring keyboardist/harmony singer with Seattle indie favorites The Long Winters (he has since left the group), Lin's commitments as a computer science student, and Huffman's new band Love Hotel, none of them expected the sessions to generate much more than a diversion. But the new songs turned out better than expected, and now the trio of Nelson, Lin, and Huffman plan to make a record of the new material as early as this summer.

The band is thrilled that Sasquatch will be its first festival show in four years, though they still can't decide whether or not to play "Flagpole Sitta" there.