Album · Harvey Danger
Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone? by Harvey Danger
Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone? is an album by Harvey Danger, released in 1997. 2 songs from it have charted on rock radio countdowns, with 77 countdown appearances in total. The biggest is “Flagpole Sitta”, on 75 lists and voted number one once.
Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone?, the debut album from American smart-alecks Harvey Danger, first came out on July 29, 1997, on the tiny Arena Rock Recording Company, with John Goodmanson producing. The band was Sean Nelson, Jeff Lin, Aaron Huffman and Evan Sult on drums, and they made a record of bookish, fast-talking power-pop punk with more wisecracks per minute than anything else in a scene still hungover from grunge.
The second track made them. "Flagpole Sitta" is a jittery blast of nerves and hooks, and when it caught fire on American radio, Slash Records, part of the London Records family, picked the album up and put it back out. "Private Helicopter" followed it to radio on October 13, 1998. The rest of the record is wordy, twitchy and quick on its feet.
The title comes from a line in "Radio Silence", a line that may have drifted in from the Paul Newman film Harper. It has since been praised as a defining indie power-pop punk record from a moment when grunge was king. On July 29, 2014, exactly 17 years after its first release, No Sleep Records put it out on vinyl for the first time.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Songs from Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone? on radio countdowns
| # | Song | Strength | Lists | Best | #1s | Years |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Flagpole Sitta | 75 | #1 | 1 | 1997–2026 | |
| 2 | Private Helicopter | 2 | #41 | – | 1998–1999 |
Only songs that appear on at least one countdown are listed. Release data from MusicBrainz.