Too Much Joy

Not every band can say they were sued by Bozo the Clown, spent the night in jail for covering "Me So Horny," or got to work with both LL Cool J and KRS-One, but Too Much Joy managed all that and much more. Specializing in hooky, uptempo rock that pre-dated pop-punk both in its playfully aggressive drive and goofball sense of humor, Too Much Joy earned a potent cult following in the late 1980s and early '90s, as 1988's Son of Sam I Am took them from the indie ranks to the major labels. Their ability to get serious once in a while took up a bit more of the spotlight on 1991's Cereal Killers, and 1992's Mutiny featured the almost-hit "Donna Everywhere" before the band's momentum began to wind down. While Too Much Joy were on hold by the end of the '90s, the group would stage periodic reunions, and returned to active duty with 2020's Mistakes Were Made and 2022's All These Fucking Feelings. Too Much Joy were formed by four high school friends in Scarsdale, New York, a mostly upper-middle-class suburb north of New York City in Westchester County. Vocalist Tim Quirk, guitarist Jay Blumenfield, bassist Sandy Smallens, and drummer Tommy Vinton first started playing together in 1981, when they were all in tenth grade. Calling themselves the Rave, their repertoire initially consisted of Clash covers, but they began to work in original material when they realized that their audience wouldn't know any better. When the quartet graduated from high school in 1983, they split to attend separate colleges, but kept the band going during their breaks from school, occasionally making self-financed recordings in a small studio. Eventually they settled on the name Too Much Joy, allegedly taken from a phrase Quirk had scribbled on paper while tripping on mushrooms. Too Much Joy reunited to give music a real shot in 1987, when all of them had graduated from college, and compiled their recordings of the past four years into a debut album. Green Eggs and Crack was released by the small Stonegarden label that year, and the smart-alecky humor of songs like "Drum Machine" helped earn them a small collegiate following and a deal with the southern California indie Alias. Their second album, the more consistent and musically accomplished Son of Sam I Am, appeared in 1988, and featured a cover of LL Cool J's "That's a Lie." It also introduced the song "Clowns" with an unintentionally suggestive soundbite from a Bozo the Clown record; when the band explained the source of the sample in interviews, Bozo caught wind, sued them, and forced its removal from subsequent pressings of the album. Son of Sam I Am earned Too Much Joy a major-label contract with Warner subsidiary Giant, which re-released the band's sophomore album in 1990. While waiting for their major-label debut, Cereal Killers, to be mixed for release, the band caught a news report on the arrest of the 2 Live Crew by Broward County authorities for performing obscene material. As a protest against censorship, Too Much Joy flew to Florida and performed a highly publicized club show on August 10 that featured a generous selection of songs from the 2 Live Crew's As Nasty as They Wanna Be album. They were duly arrested, thrown in jail for a night, and charged with obscenity, giving a substantial boost to the release of Cereal Killers in 1991. The single "Crush Story" was a college radio hit, and songs like "Long Haired Guys from England," "Theme Song," "King of Beers," and "Thanksgiving in Reno" helped expand their cult significantly. A supporting EP, Besides, comprised the album's core ballad, "Nothing on My Mind," with outtakes like the infamous "Take a Lot of Drugs." Too Much Joy returned in 1992 with Mutiny, which found both their lyrics and musicianship heading down a more mature path (albeit with slightly less polished production than its slick-sounding predecessor). The lead single, "Donna Everywhere," got some more attention from college radio, but on the whole, the band's cleverly ironic sense of humor was much less in evidence, and some of the following they'd won with Cereal Killers began to lose interest. Giant dropped them in 1993, and bassist Smallens decided to leave in 1994; he was replaced by Mutiny producer William Wittman. Also in 1994, a Too Much Joy fan who was working for Newt Gingrich convinced the Congressman to adopt TMJ's "Theme Song" as a campaign anthem; Gingrich agreed, but quickly backed off when he found that the band also recorded songs like "Take a Lot of Drugs." After a long layoff, TMJ signed with Discovery and issued ...Finally in 1996, which continued their path to musical and lyrical maturity, while returning them to the less polished-punk attack of their earlier albums. The band subsequently went on an unofficial hiatus as its members followed day jobs that took them to different parts of the country. They did manage another release in 1999's Gods & Sods, a collection of B-sides, rarities, outtakes, and the like that appeared on the small California indie Sugar Fix (which also reissued Green Eggs and Crack with three new tracks from 1993). A 1997 reunion concert from Washington D.C. was given a belated release in 2001 as Live at Least, and Quirk and Blumenfield would form a new project, Wonderlick, who would release a pair of albums, 2002's Wonderlick and 2009's Topless at the Arco Arena. Blumenfield was also a member of the Its along with fellow TMJ alumni Wittman and Vinton, who gave their recordings a digital release decades after the fact. The members of Too Much Joy also did the odd studio session, such as recording a cover of "We Are the Clash" for a 2017 tribute album devoted to the Clash's disastrous final album, 1985's Cut the Crap. TMJ issued the recording on a three song single along with a new original tune, "We Are Not The Clash," and a Joe Strummer solo number, "Trash City." During the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020, the members of Too Much Joy (which now included both Sandy Smallens and William Wittman, making the band a quintet) found themselves with time on their hands, and they began passing old demos and rehearsal tapes of unused songs from the 1990s back and forth. They struck upon the idea of cutting a new album, and new songs were soon added to the mix. As they recorded in isolation (Smallens, Vinton, and Wittman called the East Coast home, while Quirk and Blumenfield settled on the West Coast), the material came together on 2020's Mistakes Were Made. Fans eagerly embraced the album, and Too Much Joy kept up their virtual songwriting and recording, collecting enough material for a second album of fresh material, 2022's All These Fucking Feelings. To support its release, the five-piece Too Much Joy line-up gathered in one place for the first time since they began work on Mistakes Were Made to stage a reunion tour, their first in 15 years – albeit a tour that only consisted of three dates in New York and Massachusetts.
© Steve Huey & Mark Deming /TiVo