“Hello all you beautiful people of Oshkosh, Wisconsin!” Mark McGrath yells, with all the sincerity a guy who hosted Extra can muster, to a middling chorus of claps and “Wooo!”s. “Thank you for coming out tonight, to celebrate that 90s music we all know and love.”
And with that, McGrath launched into another song we all know and love—well, a song we all certainly know. Because ultimately, the main truth of the Under the Sun tour—a touring 90s pop rock revue that casts Smash Mouth, Sugar Ray, Blues Traveler, and Uncle Kracker as the Four Horseman of the 90s Nostalgia Apocalypse—is that there are very few songs everyone actually loves. Under the Sun is like listening to someone’s bizarrely constructed Summer Hits of the 90s playlist; you’re not hearing your favorite songs, or even the best songs of the era. You’re hearing a bunch of songs you remember from your junior high years, loud, outside, and with alcohol available. You can party like it’s 1999 for the price of a concert ticket.
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I went to Under the Sun last week as part of my hometown’s Waterfest, a weekly debauchery orgy that has happened nearly every Thursday during the summer for 29 years right on the banks of the Fox River at the Leach Ampitheater. Waterfest is known among the teens of Oshkosh for bringing in the most played-out bands imaginable—we used to joke Tommy James and the Shondells were booked out for 30 years out—because that’s who the Baby Voomers who bought tickets and beer at Waterfest wanted to see: the bands of their misbegotten youth.
But then, and it seemed suddenly, the bands went from being boomer rock, to being hair metal, to suddenly being bands I used to listen to when I was 13. I had suddenly become the target market for a nostalgia package tour. I used to listen to Smash Mouth’s Fush Yu Mang with my dad in a house one mile from the Waterfest grounds. I paid for my first concert ticket to a Sugar Ray show a mile in the other direction at the Kolf Sports Center at UW-Oshkosh. I had no choice: I needed to be there.
A decent percentage of Oshkosh’s under-30 community clearly felt the same way; I would venture it was one of the youngest crowds in Waterfest’s history. Because there is a dearth of entertainment options in Oshkosh—and because unlike in cities on the coasts, there is virtually no cool cachet in going to anything in Oshkosh because no one gives a fuck who you are, where you are, or why you are there—concerts like Waterfest draw the weirdest possible grouping of people imaginable. Guys wearing unironic Tony Stewart shirts palled around with Oshkosh’s trial-basis hipsters, old men out for a beer and a tan stood shoulder to shoulder with people spending the entire show complaining about how “lame” the concert was, even though they paid $20 to get in. Bros wearing Warrick Dunn jerseys sang every single word to “Answer the Phone” alongside people who freaked out at every Blues Traveler harmonica solo.
Uncle Kracker, he of “I was the third most famous person in Kid Rock’s crew after Joe C (RIP) and Kid Rock’s son” fame, opened the show, probably because no one can name more than one Uncle Kracker song (“Follow Me.”) But it turned out he has at least three songs you’d probably remember, and bolstered his set with a bunch of covers, including one of Dobie Gray’s “Drift Away” (which he released in 2006, apparently). The main precedent Uncle Kracker set in the backwards-looking night wasn’t musical; it was that he was dressed like he was ready to hit the Par 3 course after the show, a sartorial choice of #dadwear matched by every band throughout the night.
The underlying message of a tour like Under the Sun is that new music is scary to people. You reach a certain age, and you’re sick of having to discover new stuff, and you just want to experience the music you loved when you were 13 in a place with cheap beer. You are at Under the Sun to forget that pop radio sounds like a European club now, and rock bands are now called Skrillex and they’re not even rock bands. Under the Sun is about getting to pretend like your own inevitable demise is not inevitable; 1999 forever is possible, if you want it.
But here in reality, it’s 2014. Instead of pretending like he’s still a conquering hero, McGrath tackled his own obsolescence head-on during Sugar Ray’s set, which happens second, because in 2014, Sugar Ray opens for Blues Traveler, apparently. I have never seen a band or man more enraptured with recounting his band’s success numerically. He set up “Every Morning” recounting how Sugar Ray had singles blocked from number one by TLC and Cher, but “Every Morning” was the one that broke through. At one point, he yelled, “We’re gonna play a number one song right now, early in the set, because (pause for emphasis) we’ve got A LOT OF THEM.”
Sugar Ray was probably the best band of the show, all things considered; it’s impossible to withstand the charms of a set that includes “Someday,” “When It’s Over,” and “Fly” and also included a cover of “Blitzkrieg Bop” to honor the recently deceased Tommy Ramone. McGrath might be a bit of douche—he reportedly kicked out all but one of the remaining original members of Sugar Ray in 2013 (he maintains they left of their own accord)—but his lack of pretension and self-awareness (he made more bad jokes during his banter than your uncle did in line for casserole at Thanksgiving) remains the reason he’s been a semi-famous public figure in places like Oshkosh for 20 years.
Blues Traveler hit the stage next, and they delivered their biggest hit, “Run Around,” super early in the set, it seemed, in order to showcase their current incarnation as the jammiest jam band this side of Phish. The minimal weed smoke at Waterfest was never cloudier than during their set. Watching Blues Traveler though, you realize that maybe the attendant juxtaposition that comes with stories about bands on their way down to the county fair circuit—the record sales, groupies, and hilarious movie tie-ins set against the current less than world-conquering version of the bands—is shortsighted. Blues Traveler had one huge hit 20 years ago, and they get to spend the rest of their lives touring. Tomorrow, they’re going to roll into a town to play music for people who still love them, and even though there are fewer of them than 20 years ago, they still have a job that is ten million times better than whatever you or I am going to be doing tomorrow morning.
Which has to explain why Smash Mouth are still out on the road; they must really like touring to not be sitting on the licensing income from “All Star.” The reaction to them was more pronounced than for anything that came earlier; the people of Oshkosh fucking loved Smash Mouth, even the deep cuts. “Walking on the Sun” got the same reaction it probably got in 1998 and “Can’t Get Enough Of You Baby” was treated like it was the Beatles playing “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” at Shea Stadium. Their lead singer wore what seemed to be a Titleist hat and seemed perpetually on the verge of dashing off to a boat party, but people hardly cared.
It was late in Smash Mouth’s set when I realized you aren’t really living your best life till you see 3,000 people go fucking mental to the Smash Mouth song from Shrek, because that’s what happened. A kid near me ran in a circle screaming the lyrics the whole time, and people sang it on the walk out of the venue too. At that point, I had been turning up to the hits of 15 years ago for four hours and I realized I had been smiling the entire time. I spent my time at the Leach Amphitheater remembering taping “Fly” off the radio when I was 11 because I couldn’t afford the CD single, and there I was, in 2014, watching Sugar Ray play “Fly.” I remembered being at the eighth grade dance and hearing “All Star” and thinking, “Geez, enough with this song already,” and there I was in 2014, three-fourths drunk seeing Smash Mouth perform “All Star,” and thinking, “Geez, enough with this song already.”
The point of pop cultural life is that you live long enough to see everything you love brought back and repackaged endlessly till you die, comfortable in the notion that your era of pop culture was the best. Lou Reed once said, “I don’t like nostalgia unless it’s mine.” I used to roll my eyes like a pool ball rolling down a marble floor when Generation X’ers and Baby Boomers would go on and on about stuff from their youths being brought back out for remakes and reunions and nostalgia tours and how it made them Feel. Now I’m dealing with the fact that I know that the Under the Suntour is manipulative and represents the exact moment when my cultural memories become ripe for paying money to feel 14 again. But damn Mark McGrath if it didn’t work.
Andrew Winistorfer wakes up every morning to a halo hangin’ from the corner of his girlfriend’s four post bed. He’s on Twitter — @thestorfer
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