For alt-rockers Wheatus, playing Musikfest, ‘Dirtbag’ image still fitting

BETHLEHEM, Pa. — A few years ago, alt-rock band Wheatus, best known for its hit “Teenage Dirtbag,” which now is a TikTok sensation, started planning a 20th anniversary re-release of the 2000 self-titled debut disc that contained that hit.

But it hit two major snags.

The second snag was the coronavirus pandemic, which Wheatus frontman Brendan B. Brown says meant “all of the winter and spring of 2020 was just completely annihilated for being able to work.”

But there was an even bigger problem for Wheatus — which at 9:30 p.m. today, Aug. 11, will play a free show on Musikfest’s Americaplatz stage at Levitt Pavilion SteelStacks.

• Alt-rock band Wheatus, known for its 2000 hit “Teenage Dirtbag, will play Musikfest’s Americaplatz stage at Levitt Pavilion SteelStacks at 9:30 p.m. Aug. 11
• Wheatus soon will release a 20th anniversary version of its self-titled debut album, which contained “Teenage Dirtbag” — four years late
• “Teenage Dirtbag” is having yet another revival with a Tik Tok trend in which famous people sing the song

It seems that Sony Records, with which the band had a bitter falling out shortly after “Teenage Dirtbag,” had simply lost the master tapes for the debut album, Brown said.
In a phone call while pumping gas at a New Jersey service station, Brown said the band “all through the years, we were kind of stunned” that it had never gotten any requests to license the song for other uses.

“No remixes, nothing,” Brown said. “And we thought that was kind of odd and we reached out several times to see if they had a copy and we could get out hands on a copy so we could work with it a little bit or maybe just be the custodians or something — so we could get them to people if they needed it.

“And we never got any answers back.”

Many lives, then recreation

“Teenage Dirtbag” had mild success when first released — it peaked at No. 7 on Billboard’s Modern Rock chart and helped push the debut album into the Top 100.

But the song has had many more lives — used in the hit films “Loser” and “Bully,” on the HBO miniseries “Generation Kill” and even the recent crime drama Netflix “The Girl from Plainville.”

The fact that the master tapes for that song and the rest of the album were missing put a significant hurdle in front of Weatus’s plans for the anniversary release.

Brown said that in 2014, he scrambled to find “the penultimate set of masters — four tapes, eight tracks on each tape” and began working with them.

“And of course, that’s not the entirely of the masters, it’s like the last generation before we finish,” he said. “So it was missing some guitars and some vocals … and percussion.”

But “it provided a good enough template with which to start over, so we would get it right in terms of feel,” he said.

“Around 2017, and we started with those archives, replacing one instrument at a time. We wanted to do a completely faithful recreation of those multi-tracks.

“And by the time 2019 rolls around, we were getting ready to go into a break-neck mixing phase, where we would get everything together and get it out for 2020, and that was when the pandemic happened.”

‘Our only hope’

Brown said that when the pandemic halted most music activity, Wheatus “realized that we had to focus all of our efforts on finishing ‘Teenage Dirtbag.’ It was our only hope to get that one out.”

And it did, releasing a re-recorded “Teenage Dirtbag” in April 2020 — “twenty-years-to-the-day anniversary of when we delivered it to Sony music.”

Brown said Wheatus wanted to maintain the integrity of the song, and paid close attention to details when recreating it. But it also wanted to make sure it was up to modern standards.

“It’s a little bit funkier, first of all,” he said. “Back then, there was a loudness war — CDs were very, very loud and very, very bright. And the stuff that came through the major label system was designed to be competitive — it was designed to really hit your CD player very, very hard, you know?

“A lot of those records sound pretty slammin’, but in terms of fidelity, that wasn’t always where it was at. And if you look back, you kind of see the limits of that — they’re a little too crunchy, some of them aren’t very warm sounding. A little too much like their face is smashed up against a glass window.”

Brown said Wheatus wanted “to back that off and give it a little bit more dynamic … so we took the opportunity to make those slight changes” — so slight that “people have confused the two of them.”

“They do share enough with one another to be confused with each other. So maybe a successful move there, in not disappointing anyone,” he said with a laugh.

“Didn’t want to let anybody down with this new version and say, ‘Aw, they shouldn’t have done this. This is garbage.’”

Pushed by the pandemic

Ironically, the pandemic slowdown let Brown and Wheatus focus on the rest of album — including adding bonus tracks.

“It’s almost like the pandemic rebooted us in this weird way,” he said.

With studios closed and touring stopped, Brown said he went back to “tons and tons of songs” that he had demoed, starting in 1994, before the first album was released.

Those songs now will be incorporated into a 20-song version of the “Wheatus” re-release, Brown said.

“Over the years, of course, unfinished tracks wound up getting finished, and a lot of them sounded like they belonged on Album 1. And that’s reason we didn’t finish them and record them — because we felt like that was another time and another place, and it just seemed we were on to other things.

“But this opportunity to re-record Album 1, and have a new master that we actually owned, brought up this whole sort of archive of other songs that were sort of shelved, effectively, for seeming like they sounded too much like the first record.

“So we had the opportunity to get them out and get them finished up and learn them and get them recorded. And I have to say I’m much more excited about that group of songs than anything else. They represent like an alternate universe version of our first album.”

Brown said in the interview that, “I’m happy to say that just last night, I came close to finishing mix number 19 out of 20. That’s going to be a song called ‘Pretty Girl,’ and its partner release will be a song called ‘Dark Day.’ And those two will be the last two of the 20-song version that was meant for the year 2020.

“So we’ll finally be finished.”

The group is remastering it for vinyl and hopes to have it out in 2024, maybe later 2023 — “supply chains allowing,” Brown said, jokingly.

Yet another revival of ‘Dirtbag’

As the album nears completion, “Teenage Dirtbag” has undergone yet another revival.

Starting last year, it went “hugely viral across social media,” Brown said, with more than 2 billion views in less than a month. Especially on TikTok, the song has been shared sung by rapper Lil Nas X, Madonna, Alice Cooper, Jon Bon Jovi, Lady Gaga and more.

“That’s blowing my mind,” he says. “It’s so strange and interesting and fascinating and I can’t quite yet understand it, how Lil Naz X and Quincy Jones both think this is something they need to do. How the hell, like, Cheech and Chong and Katie Curic both want to be involved in it.

“It’s like a unifying weird thing. It’s just, like, wow. Certainly there’s no intention that can be claimed. Obviously you write a song, you want it to be good and you want a lot of people, you want most people to be able to enjoy it.

“But the idea that 23 years later it’d bring disparate voiced together, it’s so strange. Crazy. My mind is blown.”

But Brown said the song remains special to him, as well.

“I love it,” he said. “I have never had a bad time with that song. … ‘Dirtbag’ is the flagship that a lot of the other songs in our catalog aspire to. We’re lucky that way — that it’s kind of the locomotive to the whole thing.

“And it still makes sense to us. Identity-wise, it’s the sort of identity song and it feels right to sing it still. It feels true to who I was as a kid and the adult that I have become.”

And, he said, he feels pround that other people make that connection, as well.

“Everybody needs to feel this at some point. Loneliness and alienation, or maybe you’re standing at a crossroads identity-wise and you need to make a choice,” he said.

“I need to not be glib about that. For some people it’s much, much harder than others. And for some people, loneliness does not go away; for some people it’s a condition, and I don’t mean to make light of it.

“Maybe that’s what it is — that it’s part of the human condition to be lonely, to be alienated, to have to learn something about yourself in isolation.”