NC writer Eddie Huffman sent us this great one. Thanks so much, Eddie.

Around 2004 and 2005 I was in a long-distance relationship with a woman who lived in southern New Hampshire. One cold winter night I flew up from Raleigh and she picked me up at the airport in Boston. As we headed north, I started scanning radio stations in her Mustang and stopped on a college station. (Even though, as Spinal Tap manager Ian Faith reminds us, Boston isn’t a big college town.) I think I finally ended up on the Emerson University station, but I wouldn’t swear to it.
Then came the Popes. Something off their first EP – “Marilyn” or “Charmless,” maybe, I forget. But it was the Popes. On the radio. Nearly 20 years after the record came out. I’m in love with Massachusetts. I’m in love with the radio on.
It floored me. I think I actually stopped to consider whether there was any chance I had put a CD in and just forgotten … though I probably hadn’t even digitized that EP yet. I fumbled for my cell phone and called my BFF Phil Collins back home in North Carolina, front man for Satellite Boyfriend, the band that (so I’m told) helped inspire the formation of the Popes.
“Boob!” (We call each other Boob, from a Barney-Gomer argument on an episode of “The Andy Griffith Show.”) “They’re playing the Popes! A college radio station in Boston is playing the Popes right now!”
Part of it was simply the shock of a relatively obscure North Carolina band getting props from a college DJ hundreds of miles away and more than a few years after the fact. But it wasn’t just any old North Carolina band – it was one of my favorite bands ever. It seems a little silly, but hearing the Popes on the air ca. 2005 is one of my favorite musical memories ever. Radio on!
From the word go I loved the Popes, for many of the same reasons I loved Satellite Boyfriend: clever lyrics, terrific hooks, a brilliant, twisted pop sensibility. They played with fire and drive in that barely post-punk era, but didn’t wallow in obscurity or pretentiousness. They just delivered the goods, song after song, show after show. They didn’t sound like anybody else, really, but seemed to distill the best parts of many of my favorite bands: Cheap Trick, the Kinks, the Who, the Beach Boys, the Turtles, the Replacements. They made a Smokey Robinson and the Miracles joke on the front cover of their first record, and they tossed off a funny, obscure Prince joke in the fine print on the back cover. (Repeated, in slight variation, by the Public Good a couple of decades later.)
Double bills with Satellite Boyfriend and the Popes were my favorite. Especially the show at the Cradle where the Popes opened (as I recall) with “Alicia in the Black Dress,” a Satellite Boyfriend song. I was standing backstage with two or three of the SB guys, and we all went running out front when we realized what they were playing.
I wrote a story about them for the Durham Herald-Sun. (Which I hope to scan and post online eventually, but I haven’t laid my hands on it yet.) I wore my Popes T-shirt for years, until I got too fat and/or it got too ragged. I think it was Cheryl Parker who told me my white Popes T with green lettering was one of the rare ones, which made it that much more special. I still cherish my copy of their “Afar” cassette, which I digitized years ago, along with my vinyl copy of “Hi, We’re the Popes.” Glenn Boothe gave me a CD of other Popes material awhile back, and I still hope to get all their material in one place eventually ... but life gets complicated.
Over the years everybody drifted apart, and I would only get sporadic news from Pope John and Pope Steve. I heard they were in Atlanta, and at some point I laid my hands on a copy of a Lucky Lads CD. I heard John had moved to England, though I don’t remember whether that was before or after Atlanta. Life rolled on. Phil finally gave up his dream of being a lifelong grad student, got married, became a lawyer, and spawned two funny, lively, beautiful daughters. I went through a horrible divorce that reminded me many times of the Popes song “No Possessions.” But eventually my two wonderful sons and I emerged from all that pain mostly intact, and one of them is now a professional musician himself.
Phil and I would continue to geek out over John and Steve’s music over the years, beyond my freakout over the radio surprise. I remember calling Phil another night in the late ’80s or early ’90s while watching the Monkees’ movie, “Head,” when it struck me how much Steve sounded like Mickey Dolenz. I’m not sure I’ve ever stood at the corner of Franklin and Columbia streets without thinking of the line “She bikes across Franklin” from “She’s You,” a song that has always felt to me a bit like a three-minute version of “The Graduate” set in Chapel Hill. And just as “Dazed and Confused” is the perfect time machine to carry me back to 1976, “The Cornerhouse” is the perfect time machine to take me back to, say, 1973. (I even had a best friend named Gray for awhile, though not till the late ’70s.)
At some point in the late 2000s I started hearing rumblings that Steve and John were making music again. They were living in D.C. and calling themselves the Public Good. I saw them play for the first time live at Glenn’s club in Chapel Hill, Local 506. This wasn’t the Popes, but it was something equally good. Another band making great power pop with terrific hooks and clever lyrics, worryiang about adult concerns like health insurance and imagining the girlfriends they’d have if they still had hair. Once again John and Steve were creating a soundtrack for my life, and doing it with charm, nerve, and self-deprecating humor.
The only disappointment to me was that they seemed so estranged from their Popes material. I heard John make defensive comments rejecting the past and insisting that the Public Good was making music as good as anything he and Steve had ever done. I agreed, but I was sad that he felt the need to pit one band against the other. At that 506 show, somebody yelled for a Popes song (“Charmless,” I think). John rolled his eyes and said something like, “Yeah, why don’t you come up here and show us what key it’s in.” His alienation from his own musical past reminded me of another John: John Fogerty, in his first decade or so post-Creedence, justifiably angry about getting screwed by his label and refusing to play any of the songs that made him famous. (Who could blame him at that point? He had to pay somebody else for the right to play his own songs.)
Turns out the Popes went through their own shit, one of the sad curses of the entertainment industry, and one that seems to catch up to everybody sooner or later. Phil and I met John for brunch in Alexandria one day back in May on our way home from a weekend trip to Philly, and Phil and John talked about all the ups and downs of being in bands, the disappointments, the management problems, all the crap that can come with being in a band, after awhile.
But they also talked about the perspective you get after a few decades, the ways you keep yourself engaged and moving forward as the years add up. There were some sad topics on the table that morning, but it was mostly a joyous reunion, full of laughter and good memories.
All of which makes me very happy to hear about the re-release of the Popes’ first EP, and glad to see that John and Steve are now embracing their past instead of rejecting it. They have a rich history that’s well worth celebrating, and a bright future ahead. Radio on!