The Alternative Number Ones: Toad The Wet Sprocket’s “Fall Down”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

Rock critics love a narrative. Our whole job is the narrative. Without it, we've got nothing. We devote our professional lives to an arcane practice -- spinning stories out of pieces of music, extrapolating larger ideas from organized sound-patterns. Scenes? Subgenres? Biographical fun facts? That is our shit. Really, that's all this column is. When a rock critic encounters a band with no narrative, that poor slob can only flop around hopelessly, coming up with new hyphenated adjectives to describe guitar riffs. Or maybe that poor slob can come up with a narrative and impose it on the band.But the band has to give us something to work with.

Back when radio mattered, narratives were optional. If a band had a narrative, that wouldn't necessarily hurt them on radio. It might give DJs something to chat about in the 15 seconds between song identifications and commercial breaks, but any references to narrative were pure sideshow. The songs themselves were the real attractions. (In the spaces where radio still matters, narrative remains optional, and so do songs themselves. Radio stations will just keep playing the same 12 songs forever until the charts freeze into rigor mortis. It's crazy.) If a band had a funny name in the '90s, then that could be the narrative, as far as radio DJs were concerned. A critic might not be able to hang a magazine feature on the fact that a group of fairly anonymous guys from California freely chose to use the name Toad The Wet Sprocket, but a radio DJ was happy to riff on that name for a few seconds and then move on.