The Cucumbers

The Cucumbers were Jon Fried and Deena Shoshkes, a husband-and-wife team who set up shop in Hoboken in the early '80s and played power pop with the kind of chemistry you only get from people who finish each other's harmonies. They'd met in a freshman dorm at Brown University, where they started out singing folk and jazz standards on campus, two voices and Fried's acoustic guitar, and they kept living and writing together, even through a spell in Europe.

"My Boyfriend", on the 1983 EP Fresh Cucumbers for Profile Records, was their first song, and it took off on the college radio charts: a bright, bouncy guitar tune with a grin on its face and a hook sharp enough to carry it. Both of them sing lead and play guitar. The song sent them out on tour across the country and onto MTV with a pair of videos, and brought reviews in Rolling Stone and People, plus later New York Times profiles from Jon Pareles.

The partnership kept branching out. Shoshkes later teamed with Alice Genese, David Cogswell and Frank Giannini in Over the Moon, an alternative rock band making music for kids that played rock clubs and churches around Hoboken and New York City.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.