Here’s the video for “Cartoon,” in truly excellent quality. Seeing this video was my first experience with Soul Asylum, and I had it on a 6 hour tape a friend of mine made for me. He went through his huge stash of tapes, plucking the best videos from episodes of “120 Minutes” and “Headbanger’s Ball” that he’d recorded, and using 2 VCRs to dub copies of them for me. I was a couple of years younger than he was, and still didn’t have cable, so there was not only a lot of stuff that I really liked on those tapes, but also a lot of stuff I’d never heard, but that he figured I’d dig. I didn’t always like the bands I’d never heard of, but this video made a huge impression on me (as did Buffalo Tom’s video for “Birdbrain,” by the way, which reminds me that my negligence of them on this blog thus far is criminal. We’ll have to talk about Buffalo Tom soon). Watching it now, for the first time in over a decade, some of the cartoon images that fill the space between footage of Soul Asylum performing are still intimately familiar to me. I had forgotten that I remembered them until I saw them. It’s weird how that can work, isn’t it?
Also weird is the sight of the famously dreadlocked Dave Pirner back when he merely had long hair. There are points in this video when it is clear that his hair was already somewhat messy, and starting to clump together, but for the most part he just looks like a regular longhaired dude. He also looks incredibly young, which makes sense, I suppose, since wikipedia tells me that he’d have been 24 at the time. It’s hard to believe that this video was filmed 22 years ago.
