Nothing did more to further the cause of Alternative Nation-building than 120 Minutes, MTV’s Sunday-night video showcase of non-mainstream acts. For nearly two decades, the program spanned musical eras from ’80s college rock to ’00s indie, with grunge, Britpop, punk, industrial, electronica and more in between. MAGNET raids the vaults to resurrect our 120 favorite and unjustly forgotten videos from the show’s classic era.
#84: The Buck Pets “Pearls”
The best Buck Pets artifact we could find comes from Seventeen magazine’s “New Bands” page in January 1991: “There’s no such animal as a buck pet. But if there were, your mother would never let you bring one home.” The long-haired, probably smelly, Zeppelin- and Replacements-obsessed Buck Pets had the audacity not to be from Seattle; the band actually hailed from the same Dallas-area scene that produced Edie Brickell And The New Bohemians (and, later, spawned the Toadies and Tripping Daisy). Signed by Island Records for two albums (1989′s The BuckPets and 1990′s Mercurotone, the latter of which contained “Pearls”), the Buck Pets were cast aside when they didn’t become the next Soundgarden.
