Today’s pick is the almighty 1995 release by Mike Watt called “Ball-Hog Or Tugboat?”.
Mike Watt, of course, is the bass player from seminal punk rock band The Minutemen (and later of fIREHOSE). If you want to choose one album as an amazing mid-90s alternative rock time capsule, this is it! Czech out the Wikipedia page to see the looooooong list of collaborators on the album that basically scream “90s alt rock!”.
Stylistically it runs the gamut too…including a pretty rad cover to Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain”. I first saw Mike Watt’s band perform these songs opening for Primus in the summer of 1995 and was completely blown away. Soon afterwards, I ended up buying the limited-edition, long-box version of the album, which is still a prized possession. Later that fall, I saw Watt perform again at the much smaller Metro club in Chicago, with an all-star band…which was recently released as a live album if you’d like to dig into that for extra credit.