Review Revue: Big Tube Squeezer - I Have a Thing for Love

Welcome to Review Revue, where every Thursday I dig through the KEXP stacks to share DJ reviews and comments written on the covers of LPs (and occasionally CDs) in the ’80s and ’90s, when the station was called KCMU, the DJs were volunteers, and people shared their opinions on little white labels instead of the internet.

Have you ever pulled a 30-year-old record off the shelves at a local radio station, looked at it thinking "here's a band that I know nothing about and has no connection to me," only to find out that you totally know someone in it? Well, in this line of work that sort of thing does happen from time to time.

I had to do a fair bit of Internet digging to find out anything about Big Tube Squeezer. I knew they were local, because they were in the local section, but that was about it. But then Discogs and Mudhoney's web site independently confirmed that one of the members of the band was local musician and visual artist Whiting Tennis, who is one of the more fascinating and freakishly gifted people I've had the pleasure to meet. (Whiting was also, it turns out, in the band Love + Respect with Steve Turner, hence the Mudhoney connection.)

I haven't heard I Have a Thing for Love yet, but I do strongly recommend spending some time with Whiting's musical output of this millennium. Which is exactly what I'm doing next. And if I can find a copy of IHaTfL for purchase, I very well may – unlike some KCMU DJs of yore.