The Alternative Number Ones: The Presidents Of The United States Of America’s “Lump”

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.

People were moshing. That's what I remember. They were moshing hard. This was not a surprise. It was 1996. Everyone moshed to everything. At the big radio-station festivals, people would sometimes mosh to the music that got piped in between bands. But when the Presidents Of The United States Of America played the HFStival, my local alt-rock station's annual stadium show, motherfuckers were going crazy, or at least they were going crazy in the way that people would go crazy at a show like that. It wasn't like the general-admission pit at RFK Stadium suddenly turned into a Hatebreed show. It was just people running around and pushing each other, but they were pushing each other harder than I thought necessary. I didn't think the Presidents Of The United States made mosh music, and I resolved to act accordingly.

Again: This is a vague 29-year-old memory. It could be all wrong. It probably is all wrong. There is no cell phone video of this moment, and I am dead certain that not one other person could or would tell the same story. But this is my memory: I walked into the middle of the open pit in front of me, and I started dancing like a fucking dork. I was duck-walking and chicken-strutting and doing my version of the wavy inflatable arm-guy outside the car dealership. I probably looked so stupid, but this, to me, seemed like the proper physical response to the music coming from the stage. And then a bunch of people from the crowd closed in around me, and they all started dancing like fucking dorks, too. I felt like Patrick Dempsey in that one Can't Buy Me Love scene where all the kids at the prom immediately start doing the same dance he was already doing.

This didn't really happen. I have no illusions about that. If cell-phone videos existed in 1996, and if someone bothered filming whatever I was doing, the evidence would probably just show one strange-looking kid moshing slightly differently from the way that everyone else was moshing, and nobody else would be trying to do what he did. (I don't say "strange-looking" to be self-deprecating. I was about 6'9" and maybe 165 pounds. I looked like a hallucination, not a real human being.) The memory itself is hazy, but there's enough residue left over that I can listen to the Presidents Of The United States of America and get a strangely vivid image of that afternoon.

It's June 1, 1996. It's so hot outside. I forget how I got to the stadium, but I'm separated from my friends. I'm on my own. This is not a concern. About half of my high school graduating class is at the stadium today. I can and will find a ride home after the show no problem. At some point today, a kid who I know from punk shows will hand me a flyer for a show that he booked at an American Legion Hall in Hamilton, a neighborhood on the north side of Baltimore. I don't know any of the bands on the flyer, but I will go to the show, and I will have a great time. The headlining act at this kid's show will be the Dismemberment Plan, and they will become my favorite band. But that's in the future. Right now, we're inside the stadium, down on the floor, right in between sets from Garbage and the Afghan Whigs. Everyone is moshing, all the time, but not me, not now. I am dancing like a fucking dork, and I feel alive.

I wonder how many people have memories like that -- memories tied directly to the Presidents Of The United States Of America's brief and unlikely reign as a mega-popular alternative rock band. Because if you do have any memories tied to that band, and they aren't just about the videos on MTV or the "Weird Al" parody in the Bonus Beats below, then I bet they're something like the one in my head. The Presidents were an extravagantly silly gimmick band, and their songs were exceptionally energetic, well-written novelties, but they had the incredible luck to come from Seattle at the tail end of the grunge era. They didn't sound anything like grunge, and this was to their benefit. Instead, they tapped into a rich history of whimsical alt-rock novelty bands, and they sold millions of records almost by accident. They were never the biggest alt-rock band out there, but for one week, they had the biggest alt-rock song. I wonder if they felt, in that moment, like they were chicken-dancing in the moshpit.

The Presidents Of The United States Of America did not have great hopes for their own commercial prospects when they started making music. This was the topic of one of the better songs on their self-titled debut album. It's called "We Are Not Going To Make It," and it's a joke, but it's not a joke: "There's a million better bands! With a million better songs! Drummers who can drum! And singers who can sing!"

At the time, there was no reason for childhood friends Chris Ballew and Dave Dederer to feel otherwise. They were a wacky Seattle band who didn't really fit into their hometown scene. Local crowds didn't seem to care about them much, and the two Seattle alt-weeklies definitely didn't see the vision. Soundgarden's Kim Thayil was into them, which must've been cool, but he was the one real booster they had. People kept telling their drummer to quit because his other band had better prospects. They were making a record for an indie label, and they did not think the wider world would have much interest. But funny things happened in the '90s, and one of those funny things was the brief but inarguable mass success of the Presidents Of The United States Of America.

When they were kids, Chris Ballew and Dave Dederer both went to the Bush School in Seattle. From what I can tell, it's a fancy-ish, hippie-ish private school. They got to be friends there, and they sometimes played together at open mics. Then Ballew went off to college in Boston in the late '80s and early '90s. There, he played in a punk band called Egg and busked on the sidewalk. Lots of Presidents Of The United States Of America songs started off as Egg songs. Ballew was friends and roommates with Mark Sandman, the late leader of Morphine, another trio with unconventional instrumentation. (Morphine never made the Modern Rock chart, which sucks. That band was amazing.) Ballew still describes Sandman as his mentor. For a little while, Ballew and Sandman had an improv band together, and they called it Supergroup, which is a funny name. Sandman played a two-string bass, and that's where Ballew picked up the idea. He called it the "basitar."

After a few years in Boston, Ballew headed back to Seattle, but he had a bit of a detour. A Los Angeles musician named Beck had just made an accidental hit and gotten signed, and he needed to put a band together. (Beck has been in this column once, and he'll be back.) Ballew got himself a spot in Beck's band, toured with him for a little while, and even lived with him. That must've been a true crash course in the kind of fame that can come from a novelty hit on alt-rock radio, though Ballew didn't use that momentum the way that Beck did. When Ballew finished his time in Beck's band and returned to Seattle, he reconnected with Dave Dederer, and the two of them started playing music together again.

Before they became the Presidents Of The United States Of America, Chris Ballew and Dave Dederer went though a few different band names. Dederer picked up Ballew's habit of playing on as few strings as possible. Ballew played his basitar through a guitar amp, while Dederer played his two-string "guitbass" through a bass amp -- a whole band with just five strings. They played local shows and, to hear them tell it, didn't get much response from the crowd, which makes sense. They were silly. They were almost a joke band. Their sound had nothing whatsoever to do with grunge, the music that had suddenly turned the band's hometown into a kind of tourist destination, or with any of the various grunge-adjacent flavors of music that existed on the underground. Instead, the Presidents, intentionally or not, were part of a long smartass dork-rock tradition.

Dorks have always played important roles in the history of alternative rock. Performative nerdery was part of the package for early greats like the Talking Heads, Devo, and Elvis Costello. In the '80s college radio era, bands like the Violent Femmes, Oingo Boingo, and the Dead Milkmen picked up that torch and ran with it. Maybe Weezer were part of that lineage, too, at least early on. The Flaming Lips probably fit under that umbrella at the time, and maybe you could say the same about fellow '90s hitmakers like Cake and the Ben Folds Five. It's an important thread running through the history of alt-rock radio, and the format definitely suffered when it started ignoring those bands. Maybe that's why the aforementioned Dismemberment Plan never found a bigger audience.

If the Presidents had any clear precedent, it was probably They Might Be Giants, another group with boundless energy, clever-weird lyrics, nasal voices, and unconventional instrumentation. (They Might Be Giants' highest-charting Modern Rock hit was "Birdhouse In Your Soul," which peaked at #3 in 1990. It's a 9.) TMBG were definitely an influence on PUSA, and the two bands eventually played some shows together. That type of music wasn't necessarily going to win a lot of converts in early-'90s Seattle, but it won a few. After playing a few shows without drummers, Chris Ballew and Dave Dederer got their friend Dave Thiele to play drums. He didn't really know what he was doing, so Jason Finn, drummer of the Seattle band Love Battery, volunteered his services.

Love Battery's members came from the Seattle grunge universe, and they had a spacey, psychedelic take on that style. They released a couple of albums on Sub Pop and then got signed to the A&M subsidiary Atlas in the post-Nirvana gold rush. Love Battery were going places, so people wondered why Jason Finn was wasting his time with this goofy-ass other band, but he stuck with the Presidents. With Finn on board, the band recorded a 10-song tape at a local studio, and they sold it at shows. That tape had the original lo-fi version of "Lump," the song that would make the Presidents famous. Soon afterward, the trio made the move to an actual label: PopLlama, a Seattle indie that had been operating since the '80s.

PopLlama was the home of Young Fresh Fellows, a band that grew into a college rock institution with a lot of R.E.M. ties. They were a big part of that dork-rock lineage, too. (Young Fresh Fellows' only Modern Rock chart hit was "Carrot Head," which peaked at #29 in 1990.) The founder of PopLlama was Conrad Uno, a Young Fresh Fellows friend who produced their 1984 debut The Fabulous Sounds Of The Pacific Northwest. Later on, Uno produced records for bands like the Fastbacks and the the Dharma Bums and put them out on PopLlama. Uno also worked for bands who weren't on his label, producing records for groups like Mudhoney and Love Battery. Uno produced the Presidents Of The United States Of America's self-titled debut, and it came out on PopLlama in March 1995.

The Presidents' self-titled album doesn't sound like a major-label product, but it doesn't sound like their demo, either. On the LP, the band played with verve and focus. The songs are spare and silly and a whole lot hornier than I remembered, but they've got more focus and energy than what they brought to that demo. Soundgarden's Kim Thayil liked the band enough that he wanted to play on the record, so he did the guitar solo on "Naked And Famous." You can hear the group's new approach at work on "Lump," a goofy song that has at least some tertiary connection to what wiseass Seattle punks like Young Fresh Fellows and Mudhoney were doing.

Chris Ballew has said that "Lump" started off with a line that came to him out of the blue: "Is this lump out of my head? I think so!" He mostly just liked the word "lump." I've seen some articles that mention Ballew had a benign tumor taken out of his head when he was a kid, but I can't find any quotes of Ballew talking about that himself. Could be real, could be urban legend. He didn't want to write a song about a brain tumor, anyway, so he had this sudden idea that Lump should be the name of a lady sitting in a swamp. I would have to guess that he was high when he thought of that. When the idea popped into his head, he ran over to his neighbor's house and borrowed her four-track recorder. His neighbor happened to be Lori Goldston, the cellist who played on Nirvana's MTV Unplugged In New York. I think that's fun.

Ballew recorded "Lump" by himself as a weird little lounge-pop meditation, but the rest of the band realized that it would sound a lot better if they sped it up. This was a good idea. The finished track is just over two minutes long. It's fun and energetic and ridiculous. At the opening, it's just Ballew braying over drums. When the riffs come in, they're gnarly and bubbly at the same time. I hear a little bit of deranged garage and rockabilly in the low-end on "Lump" -- the kind of thing that fellow Seattle band Gas Huffer was playing with at the same time. I also hear just a hint of Primus. But with Ballew bellowing absurdities over the top, sounding extremely post-collegiate and bringing some of the hyper-literate loudness that I hear in, say, the early Mountain Goats.

"Lump" doesn't give you much time to worry about whether it's too silly or even what the fuck Chris Ballew is talking about. It barrels forward, the snare doing its best to shatter your temples. Chris Ballew and Dave Dederer have super-similar voices, but they're an octave apart. (Come to think of it, they look a lot like each other, too.) When Dederer joins on in backing vocals, then, it sounds like two of the same guy yelling at you. The song is simple and repetitive, but it's catchy. It earns the little scream after the first chorus. This music doesn't come from the same place as Green Day's addled pop-punk, which was all over the radio at the same time, but you can see that the two bands might serve similar needs. If you were a kid who had a lot of pent-up energy and who needed to jump around, then the Presidents might do the trick.

The best parts of "Lump" are the wordless ba-ba-ba singalongs, especially with the nasty little guitar-lead bits that emerge through the bash. Those parts are the most witless, the most purely pop. But I also like the joy that the band takes in the sheer sound of words: "Lump lingered last in line for brains, and the one she got was sorta rotten and insane"; "life limped along at subsonic speeds." The chorus can be a little annoying when you're not in the right mood, but it's fast and frenzied and over quickly. At least nine times out of 10, I'll take that giddy, amateurish racket over the ultra-serious churns that were taking over alt-rock stations at the time.

The Presidents Of The United States Of America didn't necessarily realize that they had a hit on their hands in "Lump." One day, though, they played at an ASCAP showcase in Seattle. Since it was the mid-'90s, that showcase was jammed with record-label reps. The very next day, the band had seven offers from seven different big labels. When they were considering Maverick, they had a meeting with Madonna, who told them that they would never get critical acclaim because their music was too much fun, that they should just focus on making what they were making. The band ultimately signed to Columbia, and that label re-released their self-titled debut album in July 1995, just a few months after it first came out on PopLlama. Because the band recorded the LP before signing, they now own it. (All this is in a Perfect Sound Forever interview with Chris Ballew, which I have been shamelessly plundering while writing this column.)

"Lump" took off quickly. Maybe there was just something in the air. In the post-grunge moment, alt-rock could go in any number of directions, and a band of Seattle goofballs was well-positioned to suddenly break through. The "Lump" video probably had something to do with that, too. The band made the clip with director Roman Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola's son and Wes Anderson's frequent collaborator. Roman, who'd just turned 30, was getting started with his run as a video director, and he'd already done Love Battery's clip for "Harold's Pink Room." (Love Battery, incidentally, got dropped from Atlas after one album and never made it onto the alt-rock charts. Good band, though.)

The "Lump" clip opens with the Presidents Of The United States Of America, all wearing what appears to be Men's Wearhouse suits, jumping around in a boggy marsh. I bet their shoes were really, really uncomfortable. After the first chorus, they take a taxi to the Seattle harbor and ride around on a barge in Elliott Bay, playing with the skyline behind them. I really like all the helicopter shots of the Presidents summoning all the rock-out energy that they can conjure. They can conjure a lot. Roman Coppola went on to make a bunch more videos with them. Those guys got each other.

A month after Columbia reissued the Presidents' album, "Lump" was on the Modern Rock charts. A couple of months after that, it went all the way to the top. "Kitty," the band's next single, reached #13 despite the song pretty much being an extended dirty joke. Early in 1996, the Presidents made it to #8 with "Peaches," their other big hit. Frankly, I'm surprised that "Peaches" didn't chart higher than that. I remember that song being huge. But "Peaches" was a top-10 pop hit in the UK, and it somehow went all the way to #1 in France. Good song! (It's a 9.) For whatever reason, I get "Peaches" randomly stuck in my head way more often than "Lump" these days. Maybe that's just because I encounter more peaches than lumps in my day-to-day life.

That first Presidents album somehow went triple platinum in the US. The band got a couple of Grammy nominations, and they lost to Nirvana and the Beatles, which is good company. But the momentum couldn't last. The band rushed out II, their follow-up album, and it arrived in November 1996. It didn't do the same kind of business. I had the first record on cassette, and I listened to it a bunch. I don't even remember the second one existing. II still went gold, and lead single "Mach 5" reached #11, but that was a big step down. In 1997, the Presidents Of The United States Of America announced that they were breaking up because Chris Ballew wanted to try a solo career. The band broke up just after Soundgarden, and Jason Finn told Rolling Stone, "We broke up for the same reason Soundgarden did… Chris left the band."

When they announced their breakup, the Presidents Of The United States Of America already had some unreleased music ready to go. They covered the Buggles' "Video Killed The Radio Star" for the Wedding Singer soundtrack, and I definitely heard their version on the radio a few times. Their cover of Ian Hunter's "Cleveland Rocks" also served as the theme music of a bunch of later seasons of The Drew Carey Show.

Chris Ballew did, in fact, go solo, though his 2003 solo debut My First Computer didn't set the world on fire. Ballew has had a whole lot more success making children's music under the name Caspar Babypants, which I didn't know before researching this column but which makes so much sense. Ballew also stayed tight with his former PUSA bandmates. In 1999, the Presidents tried to start a band with fellow Seattle novelty hitmaker Sir Mix-A-Lot. Apparently, they recorded some music, but it tragically never came out. I remember seeing the MTV News report about that band and being like, "Huh." In 2004, the Presidents got back together and released Love Everybody, the first of a handful of reunion albums. That one didn't take off, either, but I don't think it was really supposed to.

For a while, the Presidents Of The United States Of America kept playing shows and releasing occasional records independently. Dave Dederer eventually left the group, and a guy named Andrew McKeag joined up instead. In 2016, Chris Ballew announced that the band had quietly broken up once again. In retrospect, 2016 was probably the right time to stop being a band called the Presidents Of The United States Of America. The different band members have kept busy. Dederer, for instance, has done a lot of stuff with Guns N' Roses' Duff McKagan, another product of Seattle's '80s punk scene. I don't foresee a big Presidents revival happening anytime soon, and that's fine. Some things are just meant to exist in your mind as fond but increasingly blurry memories, and I think my moment of dancing like a fucking dork is one of them.

GRADE: 8/10

BONUS BEATS: Here, of course, is "Weird Al" Yankovic's video for his "Lump" parody "Gump," which must've pretty much written itself:

Yankovic essentially comes from the same dork-rock background as the Presidents Of The United States Of America, which means his "Lump" parody is at least a little redundant. As in: Can you really parody what's essentially already a novelty song? But Yankovic stayed friendly with the Presidents, and he even directed a video for one of their post-reunion tracks, 2008's "Mixed Up SOB." Here's that one: