The Burholme Tapes: "Scotty Doesn't Know"

"Scotty Doesn't Know"

originally by Lustra

Does the fact that Burholme played a novelty song from a 2004 teen sex comedy add to the joke or strip it away? I can see an argument either way. There's a way to make it cringey, even more so than the movie EuroTrip itself. But I dunno, the way Burholme plays it, there's a certain sense of innocence attached to it, and that's funny too. Note that we're still playing it three years after the movie. The fact that it (in my view, anyway) became a Burholme song is hilarious. We didn't even know anyone named Scott.

The description above reads that this song is "originally by Lustra," and that is true, but if you were a teen in the mid-aughts, then you might read it as "originally by Matt Damon." Yes, the future A-lister played the lead singer of the fictional party band at the beginning of EuroTrip (Wikipedia says that, according to Damon, "people still yell 'Scotty doesn't know!' at me"). I guess he's supposed to be a skinhead or something? Or maybe the whitewashed version of a punk rocker in 2004 or whatever. In any case, he's singing about how he has sex with Scotty's girlfriend, Fiona. Scotty is the protagonist of EuroTrip, and an running gag is that everyone in the film loves the song, despite the fact that it kinda sucked for Scotty to find out his girlfriend was cheating on him at the biggest party of the year. Also kinda funny that there's no big confrontation between Scotty and Fiona, or between Scotty and Matt Damon. The reveal is just so huge and epic that no one even bothers to fight it. (Maybe less funny was the fact that Kristin Kreuk, who played Fiona, was totally my crush in early high school.)

But so then I'd argue that the overarching joke, as Burholme saw it, was that we performed the song because it was easy to perform, and fun. Zero thought was given to the logic of the choice. It is a song originally written for a specific real-world reason (a teen sex comedy needs a bit pop punk song) and performed for a specific fictional-world reason (Scotty needs to pursue another woman who will lead him through Europe), and neither of those reasons applied to three friends playing a dumb song in a church basement outside of Northeast Philadelphia. The song ends with "Scotty doesn't know!" chanted over and over by both the band and the audience. Again, that's illogical, but then again, high schoolers don't really need a reason to chant. Catharsis can be found even in the absurd.

I described "Scotty Doesn't Know" as "easy to perform" above, but I don't actually know if that was the case, at least for Burholme's sophomoric drummer. Please see Exhibit A, which is a extremely dimly-lit performance of "Scotty Doesn't Know" from at least a year earlier. I don't remember the exact details of this performance, but it was probably at the end or in the middle of the summer of 2006 (for comparison, the final performance that we're running through in the course of this blog project is from August 2007). You can hear us (kind of), and you can really only see my right forearm, but even that forearm is embarrassing. Take a look:

Directly comparing the two, I'd say that the main issue, rhythmically speaking, was that I couldn't keep up with the tempo. There are other fuck-ups that are corrected over the year of practice in between, but that's the main one. You'll notice (maybe) that in the 2006 version, I'm attempting to hit eighth notes on the hi-hat, but in 2007, I had switched to quarter notes. A hack? A cheat? I mean, I'm not a professional, so I don't really think it matters. All I know is that it helped to keep the tempo up, and helped keep the energy up, and plus allowed for some nice fills in between some of the measures.

I remember being in that garage, practicing. Maybe this song, maybe another, I don't know. But I remember explaining to Mike and Kev something I had figured out on the drums. E.g. I was like "yeah, and all I had to do was switch to quarter notes and then that allowed me to do the flammadiddle triplet notes on the floor tom at the end of the second chorus" or whatever, and I remember Mike and Kev laughing and Mike saying "literally no idea what you're talking about, just do what you have to do." I guess I'd have the same reaction to Mike figuring out something on guitar. My point in this paragraph is: I feel like last time I wrote a little too much about the basic drumming theory behind Burholme's versions of these already pretty simple rock songs, and maybe not many people reading this honestly give a shit. That's totally understandable. I'll try to curb myself in the future.

I am curious, though, if anyone would've been able to note that as a specific difference between the two versions presented above, or if it's just a matter of "the 2006 version being unspeakably shitty and the 2007 version being slightly less shitty." Maybe that's not the point of this blog column. The point: to laugh, to cringe, to document, and to remember. Scotty doesn't know, but I sure as hell do.